James Joyce's Techno-Poetics 9781442676374

Citation preview

JAMES JOYCE'S TECHNO-POETICS

This page intentionally left blank

DONALD F. THEALL

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1997 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada

ISBN 0-8020-0968-9

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Theall, Donald F., 1928James Joyce's techno-poetics Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-0968-9 1. Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Ulysses. 2. Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Finnegans wake. 3. Joyce, James, 1882-1941 Technique. 4. Science in literature. I. Title. PR6019.O9Z832 1997

823'.912

C96-932411-1

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

TO MY THREE MAGISTRI LUDI Edmund (Ted) Carpenter explorer of culture and communication from palaeolithic to contemporary and in remembrance of H. Marshall McLuhan medieval modernist, media guru, and guide on the 'Road to Finnegans Wake William K. Wimsatt, Jr literary scholar, theorist, historian, lover of chess and logical puzzles

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

PREFACE

ix

ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCE STYLE INTRODUCTION xv

xiii

1 James Joyce and the 'Modern': Machines, Media, and the Mimetic

3

2 Art as Vivisection: The Encyclopaedic Mechanics of Menippean Satire 3 Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer 4 Singing the Electro-Mechano-Chemical Body

16

30

50

5 Books, Machines, and Processes of Production and Consumption

62

6 The Machinic Maze of Mimesis: The Labyrinthine Dance of Mind and Machine 73 7 Mimicry, Memory, Mummery, and the Multiplying of Media 8 Secularizing the Sacred: The Art of Profane Illumination

87

103

9 Assembling and Tailoring a Modern Hermetic Techno-Cultural Allegory 10 The Rhythmatick of Our Eternal Geomater 11 The New Techno-Culture of Space-Time

130 142

117

viii

Contents

12 Cultural Production and the Dynamic Mechanics of Quanta and the Chaosmos 154 13 The Relativities of Light, Colour, and Sensory Perception 14 Conclusion

184

NOTES 197 BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX 239

227

169

Preface

In 1950, not long after reviewing Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics for the Yale Scientific Magazine, I first encountered James Joyce's Finnegans Wake in a Toronto reading group consisting of Marshall McLuhan, my wife, and myself, but which was also often attended by a young journalist, a young stockbroker, and a science student. In that context, it was apparent Finnegans Wake was not only comic, satiric, and poetic, but also represented a deep insight into the new global culture that was awakening with the approach of the millennium. Joyce seemed as much akin with the new technological modes for production, reproduction, and dissemination of culture as with the medieval and European literary culture with which his work was at that time identified. In fact, he seemed a master of cultures across space and time; equally as able to connect Gaelic druids with quantum physicists, comic strips with cave paintings, and ancient Egyptians with post-electric engineers. The entire emerging techno-culture permeated his works, from feats of engineering and electro-mechanization to the films of Demille, Eisenstein, Chaplin, and Griffith. But most remarkably, he had merged poetry and fiction with philosophy, producing the first extended theorization of the book in the age of electricity and communication technologies. Subsequently, during a commitment to transdisciplinary studies in communication, culture, and technology, I also pursued my original interest in contemporary literature — modernism and its wake — investigating why as it moved towards its completion, our era might well be denominated 'the Joyce era.' Over the last decade, with the freedom permitted by retirement from senior administration, I have been able to focus those transdisciplinary interests in a first book — Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication — relating Joycean theory to the contemporary transformation of Art with a capital A into cultural production; and now in this second book outlining Joyce's techno-poetics, that is, how by embracing science, mathematics, technology, and

x

Preface

semiotics, Joyce addressed the challenge posed to the book by technological modes of communication in the emergence of cyberculture. In such a complex project, there are now more debts than one can ever fully acknowledge. Three of them are noted in the dedication to those outstanding teachers who provided me with the fundamentals. The specific interests in technology, science, and mathematics began through a friendship with Dr Donald Plocke, S.J., now professor of biophysics at Boston College, during the three years we roomed together at Yale, when we explored the interface between science and the humanities. My initiation into linguistics and semiotics was guided by my friend and colleague at Toronto, Richard Robinson, who read and discussed parts of the Wake with me. As regards this specific manuscript, colleagues I met in the Joycean and postmodernist community have provided encouragement and much needed criticism. Eyal Amiran, William Cadbury, John Gordon, Lawrence James, and Mark Troy read all or part of the manuscript with care, diligence, understanding, and helpful criticism. They contributed greatly to its strengths, while those weaknesses that remain are my sole responsibility. Other colleagues who read and made helpful suggestions include Darko Suvin and George Szantos of McGill University, and Fred Flahiff of the University of Toronto. Joyceans who contributed through their encouragement in publishing early drafts of parts of this work include Thomas Staley, Brandon Kershner, and Eyal Amiran; and the Canadian Celtic scholars Michael Kenneally of Concordia University and Joseph Ronsley, formerly of McGill University, who also published articles which grew into this book. Cheryl Herr s positive comments on an early outline of this project were reassuring and provided me with a genuine impetus to continue. Early Joyceans who offered encouragement include Bernard Benstock, Richard Ellmann, and Northrop Frye. Colleagues who participate in discussions of Joyce on the Internet in the James Joyce and Finnegans Wake discussion groups and whose remarks have helped me find insights into Joyce include Jorn Barger, Ruth Baurle, Charles Cave, Michael Ditmore, J.A. Rea, and Darren Tofts. Those working on the Wake always owe gratitude to a multitude of dedicated scholars. Work on the manuscripts by David Hayman, Michael Groden, and Danis Rose - supplemented more recently by Jorn Barger and William Cadbury — is invaluable in interpreting Joyce. Tools and interpretation provided by Clive Hart, Adaline Glasheen, Hugh Kenner, Roland McHugh, and William Tindall have been important to every student of the Wake. Roland McHugh, being a Joycean with a strong knowledge of the sciences, reassured me as to my original insights. Among more recent work on the Wake that of John Bishop, Vincent Cheng, and Lorraine Weir has provided useful guidance; while the writings of Derek Attridge, Daniel Ferrer, and Alan Roughley have been illuminating with respect to theory. But most of all,

Preface

xi

the credit must go to the corporate communal project of the Joyce community towards the understanding of the Wake, which is symbolized by Fritz Senn and his A Wake Newslitter. Financial aid and more encouragement were provided by McGill University, the Canada Council, Trent University, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Federation of the Humanities. Trent University was particularly generous in granting me an extended leave following my term as its president, which enabled me to return to this work. The personnel of Trent University's Computer Services, especially Ken Brown and George MacDougall, have provided considerable technical aid and advice. The Centre for Computing in the Humanities at the University of Toronto, through its superb software and generous technical support, made an arduous task considerably easier. Its coordinator, Willard McCarty, generously acted as a guide in my early days of learning about computing in the humanities. The TACT software for text searching and analysis developed by John Bradley and his colleagues at Toronto was an invaluable tool. Personnel at the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto have generously provided helpful assistance with specific problems that arose during the process of writing. Many thanks to three of my research assistants who helped at various stages: Ray Fritz-Nemeth, Tim Freeborn, and Darryl Burgwin. Suzanne Rancourt, editor at University of Toronto Press, has been helpful and encouraging. An essential aspect of a successful book is a dedicated, informed, and sensitive copy editor, so that special thanks goes to Ken Lewis, who, after working on Beyond the Word, has again been of inestimable aid. Finally, this project would never have come about without the encouragement, love, patience, scholarliness, wit, assistance, and penetrating, but sensitive, criticism of Joan, who has been co-worker and co-partner throughout these forty-seven years.

This page intentionally left blank

Abbreviations and Reference Style

Ulysses and Finnegans Wake have been cited following the accepted forms used by Joyce scholars. Ulysses is cited by section and line; viz. (£717.1523). Finnegans Wake is cited either by page number and line - viz. (FW123.4) - or, with reference to the accepted division of the text by scholars into four books with chapters, by Roman numeral (book) and Arabic numeral (chapter) - viz. (1.3). The following abbreviations are used throughout the text: FW

Finnegans Wake. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin 1976

JJA

The James Joyce Archive. General editor, Michael Groden. Finnegans Wake and notebook volumes edited by David Hayman and Danis Rose. 63 vols. New York: Garland Publishing 1978.

PSW

Poems and Shorter Writings: Including 'Epiphanies,' 'Giacomo Joyce'and 'A Portraitof the Artist. 'Ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson. London: Faber and Faber 1991

SH

Stephen Hero. A New Edition (from the manuscript in the Harvard College Library, incorporating the additional manuscript pages in the Yale University Library). Ed. Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, and Herbert Cahoon. New York: New Directions 1955

U

Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin 1986

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

In the spring of 1928 when the Swiss art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker first visited James Joyce at his flat in Paris, their conversation included a highly suggestive interchange about technology. She reports that Joyce asked, 'Tell me what sort of an idea do you think the word "automobile" would have aroused in the middle ages,' and without waiting for a reply, he continued, 'Certainly only that of a divine being, a self mover, thus a god.' Much later (1949) Giedion-Welcker discovered the reference in Joyces notes to Exiles where he wrote that Richard was an 'auto-mystic' and Robert was an 'automobile.' Recollecting that original conversation, she observes that there is a cultural project central to the Wake by which, 'from a key word and the conceptions it aroused, Joyce wanted to crystalize a cultural state, or better yet the cultural crisis of a century. For god and technology had moved critically close to each other.'1 Technology and the new mathematics and physics permeated the modernist movement throughout Europe, as is evident, for instance, in Marcel Duchamp's fascination with Riemannian geometry, in Jean Cocteau s and Marguerite Duras's producing films, and in the Bauhaus's wide-ranging interest in new technologies and optical theories. It should be far from surprising, then, that Joyce shared these interests in the new mathematics, new physics and scientific theories, and new technologies, especially those which involved new modes of production, reproduction, and dissemination. Giedion-Welcker, in an early article on Ulysses (1928) and another on Work in Progress (1929), clearly connects Joyce's work with these modernist and avant-garde preoccupations with new modes of movement, new ways of seeing, and new modes of expression and communication. Joyce, in fact, carries his techno-scientific interest to the point that he appears to be fulfilling and justifying a prophecy of William Wordsworth in 1802: 'If the labours of men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect in our condition, and in the impression that we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than

xvi

Introduction

at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed.' In that respect, it is interesting to note in the Wake this passage: 'I should tell you that honestly, on my honour of a Nearwicked, I always think in a Wordsworth's of that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, A.G.' (539.4-6). In carrying 'sensation into the midst of the objects of science [and technology] itself,' Joyce also turns his direction towards everyday life, treating the new sciences and technologies as elements of daily life. The importance in Joyce's work of everyday life has long been recognized, though only more recently has attention been given to specific areas of popular culture, such as newspapers, advertising, pantomime, sermons, and children's games. However, relatively little attention has been given to the place of mathematics, science, technology, and particularly communication technologies within his works, even though Joyce himself had called attention to their importance to him and to his new poetic. Joyce, by jokingly referring to his writing of the Wake as the work of an engineer, or the building of a machine, or the machining (e.g., through boring or tunnelling) of a cultural landscape, meant to point as well to the importance of applied science, machines, and technology in his poetic production, for not only is the Wake a place where in vino veritatis applies, but also in riso veritatis. James Joyce's Techno-Poetics explores this entire range of everyday culture, science, and technology in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to establish how Joyce transformed poetics in the new techno-scientific era and the new age of communication. As such it does not claim to be a comprehensive consideration of any one of these aspects, but rather an exploration of how each of them contributes to Joyce's cultural production. Since this book's interest is in techno-poetics, the range of both what it embraces within the techno-scientific and what it examines as relevant to Joyce's encounter with the new techno-cukure may often seem to go beyond what the reader might expect. As well as examining such motifs and themes as poetic engineering, poetry as cultural production, media and machines, theories of time and space, quantum mechanics, modern mathematics, telecommunications technology, and the art and science of colour and light, it probes Joyce's transformation in the new cultural production of such concepts as mimesis, memory, allegory, parody and satire, and the role of the poetic in the secularization of the sacred as the 'auto-mobile' apes the divine. Mimesis, it will be seen, is developed by Joyce in relation to the performative and to a modernist, post-Aristotelian reading of the relation of mimesis as mimicking the operation of the natural world. Joycean allegory will be revealed to be a rad-

Introduction

xvii

ical modernist transformation of the potential of baroque allegory through the multi-layered, polysemic transformation of language itself, which enabled Joyce to adapt and metamorphosize Dante's levels of meaning. If this is so, mimesis becomes a machine for producing, and modernist allegory as an instrument of assemblage and arrangement itself is part of the machinery. So the fact that Joyce himself specifically related Ulysses to Phineas Fletcher's seventeenth-century allegory, The Purple Island, will come to be seen to have some significance to Joyce's project. David Hayman speaks of the Wake in terms of allegory and its relation to the sigla Joyce used in the notebooks and ultimately included in the Wake: '1.6 (Chapter 6) rhetorically profiles or fingerprints the entities for which shorthand symbols or "sigla" had already been established - in so doing it orients the reader toward a larger semi/mock/metaphysical allegory of universal presence.' Such a concept of allegory and of the role of the sigla calls attention to the machinic nature of the Wakes generation and birth. Satire and parody have a specific relationship to the poetic machine and to the exploration and critique of mechanization and technologies. Examining the pervasive presence of Swift and Sterne and the presence of Pope in key passages in the Wake will establish that this is to a large part connected with their use of the tradition of learned satire (sometimes dubbed Menippean) in relation to a postNewtonian, post-Cartesian society which is beginning to experience the potentialities of mechanization to produce massification. So it will be necessary to explore why and how Joyce specifically and consciously chooses to adapt and transform this learned satire: first, because of its use by the neo-Augustans in relation to mathematization, mechanization, and massification; second, because in Rabelais and others, it is also used as a more general vehicle of epistemic critiques of power. Therefore, Joyce's transformation of the Menippean is not only germane to but a central factor in the development of a techno-poetic. Allegorical machinery (a kind of parody of the Renaissance and especially the Baroque) interestingly enough is central to the neo-Augustan use of learned satire, as is a preoccupation with 'the book,' its nature and construction. If learned satire historically flirted with the sacred and the profane, in a world where Joyce speaks of the displacement of divinity by the machine, some consideration of the modernist problematic of the sacred and the profane is unavoidable. While Alexander Pope's Dunciad announces, 'Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor'd; / Light dies before thy uncreating word,' in Joyce's 'chaosmos' the word is transmuted through modern alchemy so that 'flash becomes word and silents selfloud' (FW267.\6-\7). Joyce's secularizing of the sacred is not an erasure of the sacred, but an embedding of it in everyday technoculture, for 'tout estsacrepour un sacreur (FW81.29). These motifs suggest that Joyce, in the third and fourth decades of the century, was exploring the same regions as other radical modernists who were rupturing the

xviii

Introduction

structure of high modernism, such as Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille. These two writers emerge again and again in James Joyce's Techno-Poetics, not because they have a direct connection with Joyce, but because they (like others of their contemporaries) share similar significant interests. In Benjamin, this involves his meditations on technology, his theory of allegory, his fascination with the Kaballah and the esoteric, his critique of surrealism, his defence of parody and satire, his analysis of the mechanics of Kafka, and his theorizing of the avant-garde. In Bataille, whose interest in the particular details of history and of the present and whose background as a lapsed Catholic fascinated with theology and esotericism Joyce shared, this involves his theory of excess and inebriation, of the nature of the sacred and of the depth of laughter. These threefigures- Benjamin, Bataille, and Joyce - demonstrate the ambivalence of modernism, for each in his way can also be identified as performing an ontological rupture with modernist theory.5 But of the three, Joyce is the most striking. His project, which is the most radical crafting of a techno-poetics for rendering forth (i.e., making manifest or epiphanizing) the emerging techno-culture, has positioned him in the paradoxical position of being beside and beyond modernism, of launching a pre-post-modernism so that postmodernism can be seen to be 'in modernity's wake.' This unique, radical form of'modernism' I have dubbed elsewhere as 'paramodern rather than postmodern, for Joyce found that going beyond modernism was not coming after modernism, but further developing from, yet within, modernism an extremely radical modernism. Thus, as GiedionWelcker realized, tapping in on the avant-garde aspects of modernism in literature and the arts is a further reason for introducing discussions of Benjamin and Bataille. There is no claim being made that Joyce necessarily knew the work of Benjamin and Bataille, but that it is within the context of avant-garde modernism that is discussed in Bataille and Benjamin that Joyce's techno-poetics evolved. So in 1928 Giedion-Welcker could note that the qualities distinguishing Ulysses are fragmentation, cliche', typification, psychology, space-time, movement, futurism (a term which refers to cinematic-technical transmission and simultaneity), and the Dadaistic displacement and bastardization of words and parts of words.7 Most of these topics will be touched upon in the following pages, but in some ways one of the most central and elemental of them is the fragment — or, in the Joycean sense, the 'bit' - for we will see how he shapes his 'allforabit' in the Wake, a world in which metonymy reigns. The worlds of Ulysses and the Wake are poetic machines that are assemblages of bits - fragments, cliches, typifications, words, syllables, letters, and etymological roots. 'Bit,' with its relation to speaking and to eating through its association with 'bite,' yet also with its association with the tool and the mechanism, plays an important role in the Wake. Machine, machinery, technology, and engineering are crucial to such a discus-

Introduction

xix

sion. It should be noted that since Joyce is concerned with all of these elements both as components of his life-world and as instruments of composition, that this discussion will simultaneously have to examine the multitude of perspectives this implies. Some understanding of what Joyce is doing can result from adapting the term 'machinic' from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who assert that 'the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage relates not to the production of goods but rather to a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relation to one another.'8 Joyces Ulysses and the Wake will be investigated as 'machinic assemblages' and in the case of the Wake as a more complex machinic assemblage that incorporates its own abstract machine: first, in incorporating its own meta-levels; and secondly, in being in one of its aspects a meta-commentary on Ulysses. While it has been suggested that there are prefigurations of the Wake in Ulysses, for Joyce the Wake also was an important commentary on Ulysses. The assemblage of the artificers and the resulting machines are, in fact, meta-poetic comments on the way Joyce viewed cultural production in the technological era. But it is a meta-commentary that is diagrammatic and superlinear, as suggested by Joyce's use of sigla in its composition, and the incorporation of those sigla and the use of initials (HCE, ALP) and other codifications (e.g., the multiple type of the twin sons). 'Machine' and the 'machinic,' therefore, are not intended to be synonymous, although at times when the machinic aspect is obvious and the technological aspect important, 'machine' may be used, implying both the mechanical and the machinic. As the discussion proceeds, the terms 'engineer' and 'technology' will assume an ambivalence that will be explored in relation to bricolage and to Joyce's non-Aristotelian use of techne, respectively. Another problematic term, which is germane to the argument, is 'mechanics.' For Joyce, in the early decades of the century, mechanics could be synonymous with what we think of as physics as well as with the application of mathematics in engineering, or, in a more general sense, with the design or construction of a mechanical object. Primarily, it referred to the action of forces upon matter or material systems. Joyce, for example, uses it in a purposely ambiguous way in the 'structural' chart of Ulysses, and in one or another of its ranges of meaning elsewhere in his writings and his letters. While the main thrust of this discussion is directed towards technology and culture, the machinic cannot be isolated from the new physics and mathematics of the early twentieth century. Later chapters will examine Joyce's interest in and use of axiomatics and non-Euclidean and n-dimensional geometries; the influence of general relativity theory and other aspects of contemporary mathematics and physics in his treatment of time and space; his use of quantum theory and of complemen-

xx

Introduction

tarity and the uncertainty principle in the construction of the Wake; and his use of these theories, as well as optical theories of light and colour, in presenting the condemnation and defence of the Wake itself. While Joyces exercise of his craft is knowledgable, contrived, and controlled, nevertheless, like many contemporary modernists, in Ulysses and the Wake he uses such strategies to present a 'chaosmos' (FWl 18.21) of'coincidance' (49.36) permeated by the 'ambiviolent' and the 'ANTITHESIS OF [THE] AMBIDUAL' (282.Rl). The machinic may at first glance appear to be in contradiction with the chaotic, but the concept of chaos itself rises out of those mathematical and physical analyses in which Joyce was deeply interested. His 'chaosmos' is a machinic heterogenesis, for his assemblages are non-linear and characterized by complex transversality. A key passage in the conclusion of the Wake concerning vegetation and death strongly asserts the rhizomic nature of Joyce's Vicociclometer.' As the body emerges as the mechano-electro-chemical entity that it is, the body as machine and the machine as extension of the body come into play as well as those abstract desiring machines that are intrinsic to the body's transmitting life. Leopold Bloom and HCE-Finn are presented deliberately as machines. This has important implications for Joyce s emphasis on gesture, rhythm, and tactility as the generating principles of his poetic, rather than orality and literacy. The tactile becomes a key, relating the bodily also with the meandering root-like proliferation of the plant. Tactility also is related to the inner transmission of messages through the electrical activity of the central nervous system, where all is 'decomposed' into bits of electrical charges for subsequent recombination. This awareness of the nervous system and the general systemic nature of the body makes apparent why in each of the machinic assemblages a body is central. Joyce speaks of 'the handtouch which is speech without words' (.FW174.10) and 'Typette, my tactile O!' (FW478.27). So while the Wake as book plays with ratios between the oral and the written, it is a book of gesture and rhythm. In the course of the discussion, there will necessarily be some repetition of phrases and passages. Joycean polysemy with its complexity and perplexity forces re-visitation to poetic moments, since they relate transversally to a wide variety of different threads throughout the Wake. Furthermore, at times the quotes may seem somewhat long, but Joyce's play with sign and structure can only be clarified by attending to an extended passage. If these, as components within an assemblage, are already fragments, bits and pieces, it is important to see them at some length within the particular assemblage, rather than as merely quoted snippets. Wherever possible, I have kept quotations short, but always with the conviction that the interested reader will return to the text to place these within the assemblage. This does not mean there is a 'true' or 'authoritative' interpretation, but that future readings and rewritings must again be read and rewritten in contact with Joyce's text -

Introduction xxi perhaps ideally also in relation to the genesis of that text as well through the notebooks, manuscripts, and drafts reproduced in the James Joyce Archives. Nevertheless, such a process does not invite one way of approaching Ulysses or the Wake, but instead teaches us that there are a multiplicity and multiplexity of ways of approaching the poetry of our techno-culture as text. While James Joyce's Techno-Poetics is intended as an independent study of the roles and interplay of technology, mathematics, science, and everyday life in shaping the poetic theory ofJoyces Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, it also is a sequel to an earlier book, Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication. This earlier book used the theory arising from Joyce's poetic practice to demonstrate 'that a common productive activity is present in all cultural production from cartoons and comic strips, TV series and hypermedia, to poetry, painting, and drama' and 'explains how such cultural production is a vital and intrinsic part of the development and renewal of human language and communication.'9 While it is not primarily or exclusively a book about Joyce — for example, it discusses figures ranging from Kenneth Burke, Gregory Bateson, and Marshall McLuhan to Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, Dusan Makavejev, Stanislaw Lem, and Paul Klee - in examining media, film, advertising, TV, and other forms of popular culture and modernist art, it situates the discussion within a Joycean interpretation of the first half of the twentieth century and its aftermath in the second half. The current study provides the understanding of Joyce s work which informs the exploration in Beyond the Word, thus serving as a complement, supplement, and foundation to it. James Joyce's Techno-Poetics goes into areas of Joyce's work not examined at all or in any detail in the earlier book, including theories of space and time, contemporary mathematics and mathematical theory (especially axiomatics and non-Euclidean geometries), and Joyce's theory of allegory. Examples of areas not examined extensively in Beyond the Word are Joyce's use of theories of light, colour, and quanta; the background of Joyce s learned satire and its relevance to his view of the poet as engineer; and documentation of interests specific to Joyce in technology, machinery, and communication media. While Beyond the Word develops a theory concerning the ecology of cultural production and its relation to theories of communication and expression, James Joyce's TechnoPoetics explores the theory and practice that Joyce developed and its relationship to mathematics, science, technology, and electro-mechanization. Another aspect of the following argument is the degree to which past literary history emerges in a discussion that is primarily about the technology, engineering, and scientific knowledge of a contemporary techno-culture, for Joyce is an ambivalent allegorist, and as has been noted of allegory, it always performs an ontological rupture, displacing categories so fundamental to modernist theory, critique, and practice: 'for the artist-as-allegorist modernity's past always lies in the future.'10

xxii

Introduction

The beginnings of that past can be found in ancient Greece. Modern anticlericalism, a corollary to the rise of modernity, surfaces in medieval Europe and Ireland, flowering in Rabelais, the master of learned satire directed towards a specific episteme, and so such moments are part of the Wakes past that shape its future. Therefore, the relevance of Aristotle, medieval jongleurs, Rabelais and Erasmus, or neo-classicists from Jonson to Sterne, is related to the self-consciousness and awareness of the machinic, of the techno-scientific, of the artifices of engineering and the 'abnihilisation of the etym' (FW353.22). When later we see Joyce speaking of the hieroglyphs of'engined Egypsians' (FW355.23), those hieroglyphs become part of the post-structuralist future of Joyce's paramodernism. James Joyce's Techno-Poetics makes the strong claim that post-structuralist theory lies in the 'wake of the wake,' for the strategies, motifs, and themes of Joyce's poetry critically anticipate the theoretical controversies of the 1970s and 1980s, and also anticipate the presently occurring development of techno-culture into the cyberculture of hypermedia and virtual realities.

JAMES JOYCE'S TECHNO-POETICS

This page intentionally left blank

1 James Joyce and the 'Modern': Machines, Media, and the Mimetic

In other words, we must write dangerously; everything is inclined to change and flux nowadays and modern literature to be valid must express the flux. In Ulysses I tried to express the multiple variations which make up the social life of the city — its degradations and its exaltations. James Joyce in conversation with Arthur Powers

Weimar Germany and surrealist France spanned the period during which James Joyce finished writing Ulysses and began writing Finnegans Wake. The main motifs of the movements that characterized this era - expressionism, Dadaism, surrealism, constructivism, cubism — fascinated Joyce. His roots, which are in the main line of Continental modernism, developed from this base a distinctive radical modernism that has connections with the modernism of both the symbolistes and the European avant-garde, as well as with semiotics and French post-structuralism. This situation generates that peculiar paradox which permits historians and theorists to speak about postmodernism as existing 'in modernity's wake'1— that is, in the wake of the Wake. Electro-technology, exponentially accelerating the effects of the era of industrialization, which was marked by the advent of the locomotive and the war of natural resources,2 produced new modes of communication and transportation (e.g., automobiles, aircraft, electric turbines) that contributed to a process by which any imaginary composition - whether denominated as low or high art or mass communication or popular culture - came to be recognized as cultural production. In the late 1920s, Gilbert Seldes, a U.S. art and culture critic who had on occasion corresponded with Joyce, characterized this situation in The Seven Lively Arts, a collection of journalistic essays on various modes of new cultural productions. Sigfried Giedion, the art historian (and one of Joyce's closest friends in the last decade and a

4

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

half of his life), influenced partly by avant-garde movements and the Bau us, extended Seldes s perception to include as cultural production the arts of construction, design, management, and industrial production. Though Giedion develops this thesis most comprehensively in Mechanization Takes Command (1947), he and his spouse, the art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker, had been pursuing their interest in 'anonymous history' since the 1920s, a history that dealt with humble things, things not usually granted earnest consideration, or at least not valued for their historical import... In their aggregate the humblest objects of which we shall speak have shaken our mode of living to its very roots... The slow shaping of daily life is of equal importance to the explosions of history; for in anonymous life, the particles accumulate into an explosive force.

A mutual interest in the new relationship between art, technology, everyday life, and modern philosophic and scientific concepts of space-time and of uncertainty, chance, and chaos, provided part of the basis for Joyce's friendship with GiedionWelcker and her spouse, both of whom worked diligently to arrange the flight of the Joyce family from Free France in 1940.5 Sigfried Giedion's book, Mechanization Takes Command, using his slogan for this anonymous history of cultural objects as its title, succinctly summarizes one of the key motifs of our century's discourse about what constitutes the 'modern.' By 1900 mechanization and its transformation through electrification, a phenomenon that was rapidly becoming universal in its domination of the worlds everyday activities, had captivated most of the European artistic community, who were intrigued by the creative potentialities of this new culture of time and space. At the extremes of manic, authoritarian enthusiasm, in 1908 FT. Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto dedicated Futurism to singing the praise of speed, dynamism, and machinery: 'adventurous steamers scenting the horizon; large-breasted locomotives bridled with long tubes, and the slippery flight of airplanes whose propellers have flaglike flutterings ...'6 Six years later in the first issue of Blast, Wyndham Lewis declared that Leonardo was 'the first futurist and incidentally an airman among Quattro Cento angels.'7 Whether through adulatory, hyper-enthusiastic Futurist paeans of praise (e.g., Marinetti's Manifesto and Boccioni's Dynamism of a Cyclist), or through the satire and wild laughter of Dadaism (e.g., Fra^ois Picabia's Machine Pournez Vite and Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass or the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors], or reflexively as in cubism and constructivism, mechanization and electro-mechanization had invaded the imagination of the visual arts, literature, music, architecture, and the dance, ultimately engendering the postSecond World War alliance between art and technology. By 1922, when Joyce began working on Finnegans Wake, mechanization, electricity, and electrification

James Joyce and the 'Modern'

5

were already central aspects of everyday life and consequently destined to become part of the virtual world of Joyces post-electric, Menippean8 parody of comic epic, with its ambivalent hero HCE ('Here Comes Everybody' [FW32.2Q]). Another friend of Joyce's, the poet and theorist Paul Valery,9 who also promoted the revival and re-evaluation of the Renaissance polymath and artist-engineer Leonardo da Vinci as archetype of the modern artist, postulated that the method of the engineer and that of the poet were the same, rearticulating a frequent neoAristotelian theme of Renaissance poetics. Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher whose magnum of us Joyce uses as the prime structural book for the Wake, also sanctioned this association of art and assemblage.11 Joyce once jocularly compared his jerky handwriting to Leonardo s, whose notebooks were first published in full in 1883, a year after Joyces birth.12 The habit of keeping elaborate notebooks related to artistic composition marks both Joyce's and Leonardo's modus operandi. Well before Freud's Leonardo da Vinci (1918), Joyce's reading of Walter Paters chapter on Leonardo in The Renaissance would certainly have reinforced his awareness, based on his classical education, of the historical affinity of the Renaissance engineer with the alchemist, the sorcerer, and the magician. Pater notes, 'The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected to our exact modern formulas, seeking in an instant of vision to concentrate on a thousand experiences.' The Joycean poet as alchemist is also both a shaman and an engineer. Shem, Joyce's 'penman' (125.23) in the dream of the Wake, is 'alshemist' (185.35) and 'shamman' (192.23); and while composing the early versions of Finnegans Wake published as Work in Progress, Joyce jestingly observed: I have taken this up because I am really one of the greatest engineers, if not the greatest, in the world besides being a musicmaker, philosophist and heaps of other things. All the engines I know are wrong. Simplicity. I am making an engine with only one wheel. No spokes of course. The wheel is a perfect square. You see, what I'm driving at, don't you?

While this playful note to his patroness, Harriet Shaw Weaver, may ring of Celtic bravado, it includes a stricture concerning how serious Joyce is about what he is doing: 'I am awfully solemn about it, mind you, so you must not think it's a silly story about the mouse and the grapes.'1 Interpreted within the broader context provided by Ulysses, this witty, whimsical defence demonstrated for the 1920s a hyper-conscious awareness of the relevance of machines, media, and modes of communication to contemporary cultural production. Early in the composition of the Wake, Joyce clearly recognized that the poet as an engineer who is producing the work of art as a machine is also a producer of society and culture. This concept of a 'poetic engineer' was a dominant part of artistic sensibility

6

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

from about 1905 until at least 1946, and still persists in such publications as Leonardo, the authoritative journal on the arts and technology, or in the recent meteoric success of Wired, a magazine devoted to infoculture.15 Joyce and his contemporaries were acutely attuned to the import of science, technology, and human invention. The ever accelerating technological change within our technoculture characterizes the particular historical context in which Joyce matured as an artist. In the fifty years prior to his birth, telegraphy, the telephone, photography, the typewriter, the rotary press, and electromagnetic power had been developed. Within five years of his birth, Edison developed both sound recording and the electric light. During the early years of his life, the Eiffel Tower was erected; Lumiere produced moving pictures; Marie Curie discovered radium; Marconi completed the first transatlantic broadcast; the Wright brothers invented the airplane; Einstein articulated the theory of relativity; and Ford brought about the general adoption of the process of mass mechanization by utilizing standardized parts and the assembly line in the production of motor cars. Reference to all of these discoveries or inventions and most of their discoverers occur in Finnegans Wake. Joyce, like his Weimar contemporary Walter Benjamin, knew that technology is one of the keys to understanding the new role of the arts in contemporary society. In 'To the Planetarium,' the closing section of One-Way Street, Benjamin proclaims that 'in technology a newphysis is being organized through which mankinds contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form,'16 an occurrence which he had outlined earlier in an intense description of the spirit of technology: Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug in Mother Earth. This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, the spirit of technology.17

Noting the way techno-culture was transforming the concept of Art as a privileged institution, Benjamin, like many of the artists of the Joyce era, noted that the modern artist is an engineer. Through technological reproducibility, Benjamin argued, art had lost its aura and traditional cultic status. This transformation also radically altered the social function of poets and artists. The new techno-culture, with its structures, engines, and machines, also permeated the content, construction, and spirit of Joyce's final works. The dreamer of the Wake, that 'everybody,' HCE,18 is associated in the dream action with a variety of artificers (architects, builders, poets, and other constructors), the first of which is that 'man of hod, cement and edifices' (4.26—7), 'Bygmester' Tim Finnegan, a

James Joyce and the 'Modern'

7

parodic image of a 'master builder,' whose fatal fall from his scaffolding is celebrated in the Irish ballad 'Finnegan s Wake.' HCE as 'everybody' is described at great length as a 'harmonic condenser enginium' (310.1), for the Latin root of engineer, ingenium, which implies cunning, plays behind the surface meaning of all of these renditions of artificers. Motifs of building, constructing, and engineering are not only associated with specific major characters in Ulysses and the Wake (Stephen and Bloom19 as well as HCE), but the later works are replete with techno-cultural motifs. The first three pages of the Wake speak about constructing towers, including the Eiffel Tower, the Woolworth Building, and other obelisks and skyscrapers. The Wake's conclusion, which will be discussed in detail later, includes a debate between Saint Patrick and the Archdruid about the physical, perceptual, and neuro-physiological nature of light and colour ('Rhythm and Color at Park Mooting'). This debate is almost immediately followed by a remarkable statement about code and fragmentation as they relate to the operation of machinery, the production of art, the production of food, or the production of life in terms of electro-machinery (610-15). The climax of Ulysses in the 'Circe' episode takes place in Nighttown in what, viewed today from the perspective of such works as Genet s Le Balcon, can be described as Bella Cohen's fantasy machine, reminding us of the mechanics of the Freudian dream-work. 'Ithaca,' the penultimate episode, in which Bloom and Stephen return to Bloom's home together, Joyce claimed to be his favourite episode, the style of which he described as being that of a 'techno-mathematico-scientific cathechism.' In both Ulysses and the Wake, Joyce develops Mallarme's conception of the book as a literary machine, exhibiting a reflexive self-consciousness about the book which becomes a predominant aspect of the dream of the Wake, which is partly a book about a book, about Joyce s books, and about the nature and construction of books themselves. As Marshall McLuhan explained in 'Joyce, Mallarme and the Press,' Mallarme* sensed the marriage between book and machine in terms of the revolution occurring in popular culture.20 In his practice in Ulysses and the Wake, Joyce distinguishes various interrelationships between art, poetry, technics, constructing (assembling, building, making), mimesis, and the world of things and physical reality. These distinctions are central in understanding his interest in mechanics, science, mathematics, and technology, especially the new technologies of production, reproduction, and dissemination, and the importance of light, night, and awakening in his work. Joyce is an engineer who is also a 'philosophist' and thinker - in fact, who sees the making of his poetry in the Wake as the crafting of a unique, nocturnal language. With such a set of conceptions, the position of the embodied person as an assembler, builder, or constructor is central to Finnegans Wake, in which the the idea of homo faber or the tool-using animal plays a major role. Before turning more directly to Joyce's

8

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

absorption with particular technologies and sciences, it is important then to explore the relation othomofaber, man the maker of tools and tales, to the writing of books, to the effect of the printed book, and to the coming transformation of the book. The theme of man the tool-maker (homofaber) first appears in English literature in Boswell's Life of Johnson, where it is borrowed from Benjamin Franklin. This definition is first extensively developed in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus - the tailor retailored — (a book with which Joyce supplements the tailoring motifs that he primarily derived from Swift's A Tale of a Tub) — where it is argued that the most apt definition of the human person is as a tool-using animal. Tailoring, a tool-using craft and proto-technology, plays a major role in relation to tale-telling in II.3, the 'pub' scene. Furthermore, the Wake opens with Finn as the archetype of homo faber, 'the freemen's maurer' (4.18-19), who 'piled buildung supra buildung' (4.27), building buildings as well as constructing his world. This motif is later reinforced by HCE's role as homo faber in his extended Whitmanesque oration which concludes III.3. Since Finn is a mason and master builder, and HCE, a builder of civilizations, for Joyce they are both poets, which is confirmed by Anna's parting observation about HCE: 'But there's a great poet in you too' (619.31). Consequently, in the Wake there is a major emphasis on the mechanics of composition entailed in references to tailoring and weaving; building and constructing; and writing tools and their tool-like products, such as the early runic alphabet, hieroglyphics, or oghamic scripts. Joyce's fascination with the Book of Kelts, which he uses as a partial model for the Wake and which he once recommended to Arthur Powers as a guide for creative writing, underlines his view that writing books primarily involves workmanship, craft, and the production of an artefact.21 One aspect of the Book of Kelts motif and the accompanying treatment of the interpretation of the letter in 1.5 as palaeographical decipherment (121.11) of a manuscript is to associate the emergence of the book with the development of scripts and hieroglyphs rather than print (a situation substantiated by the large number of references to script and writing in the Wake as opposed to the relatively limited number to printing). The emphasis on homofaber underlines Joyce's view of writing and of poetry. As early as 1903, Joyce showed an acute awareness of the importance of the Greeks' having used the word TSKVTJ, for art, poetry, crafts, and the production of artefacts. Aristotle considered that the goal of TSKvq was to produce what nature does not produce, but by using the processes of nature to do so. In the Pola notebooks (1903), Joyce observed that Aristotle's phrase about art, nature, and mimesis is 'falsely rendered' for 'Aristotle does not here define art; he says only, "Art imitates Nature" and means that the artistic process is like the natural process ...'22 Joyce associates art as techne with the artist

James Joyce and the 'Modern'

9

as a constructor and, recognizing the classical affinity of the arts and the prototechnology of the crafts, he carries his conception of the artist as engineer forward into the post-Enlightenment eras of mechanization and electrification. But a posttechnological assembler is of necessity a comic, satiric parodist. While Joyce is intrigued by tools and machines or by electricity and photochemistry, his satiric critique is directed towards the spirit of technology and the fetishization of organization. If he realizes people are machinic — as we will see in his treatment of ALP, HCE, or the Dubliners of Ulysses — they are not technologized. In the next chapter, the central role of satiric critique in Joyces writing will be explored. Joyce's conception of the mimetic is more performative than representational, stressing action and movement with strong affinities to rhythm; yet as this examination of his techno-poetics unfolds, it will be evident that this means that the mimetic is also in some sense transubstantive. His radical modernist multi-mimetic poem is grounded in presenting the same anew, for the dream recurs 'three times in the same differently' (.FW481.11). The Wakes parodic mimicry is based on difference rather than similarity, for that is a result of having to differentiate - 'dialytically separate' — in order to 'recombine' or assemble, a process that is the topic of the concluding description of the Vicociclometer' (613-14), which will be discussed in a later chapter. If this book is a Vicociclometer,' it is an engine or machine of eternal return — 'the seim anew' — grounded in the body of the imaginary dreamer(s), which is itself machinic — the process of interaction of time, the river, and the mountain. But these processes of nature are now recognized as part of the mechanics of the physical world, just as are the flow of blood and the electrical discharges that service people's hearts and brains. Everything Malcolm Lowry says in a letter to his publisher about his writing provides a remarkable explanation of this newly emerging sense of the modern work of art, and fits Joyce's treatment of the art work as a machine, for It can be regarded as a kind of symphony, or in another way a kind of opera - or even a horse opera. It is hot music, a poem, a song, a tragedy, a comedy, a farce and so forth. It is superficial, profound, entertaining and boring, according to taste. It is a prophecy, a political warning, a cryptogram, a preposterous movie, and a writing on the wall. It can even be regarded as a sort of machine: it works too, believe me, as I have found out.24

Joyce's complex literary machine parallels the contemporary projects of Duchamp, Leger, the Dadaists, and the Futurists. Lager's silent film Ballet mecanique, produced while Joyce was living in Paris, dramatically and conclusively establishes the strong affinity of the newest mode of cultural production with the mechanical, the electrical, and the photochemical nature of light. The first of four vignettes that Joyce wrote when beginning the composition of

10 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics the Wake associates the drunken HCE alone in his pub after hours with Roderick O'Conor, 'the last pre-electric king of Ireland' (380.12). HCE ('human, erring and condonable' [58.19]), an ordinary person (an 'everybody'), as a Wakean substitute for the last High King of Ireland is a parodic, comic hero, who is then identified as a citizen of our post-electric world. In Ulysses, Bloom speaks about hydroelectric power stations and electric clocks, and anticipates the coming of 'electric dishscrubbers' (399.26), while HCE' s 'body,' with its nervous, muscular, and cardiovascular systems — heart and bloodstream - is an electric engine. Joyce s correspondence demonstrates how in this post-electric age he wished to stress the importance of mechanics, chemistry, and mathematics for his work. When Harry and Caresse Crosby, while planning the publication of some fragments from Work in Progress as Tales ofShem and Shaun, suggested someone should write an introduction, Joyce first suggested Julian Huxley and, when Huxley declined, J.W.N. Sullivan: ... when the scientist and the musicologist made excuses, he then proposed C.K. Ogden, rightly surmising that the co-author of The Meaning of Meaning and the inventor of Basic English would not resist an invitation to discuss this linguistic experiment. He wished also for Ogden to comment, as a mathematician, upon the structure of Finnegans Wake, which he insisted was mathematical.25

As a sequel to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (the title of which, it should be noted, has its own complex references to building, fortifying, producing, laying out roads, etc.), Joyce suggested that there should be 'a book of only 4 long essays by 4 contributors.' Although he had not decided on the subject of all four essays, the subjects of three of them were to be the treatment of night; mechanics and chemistry; and the humour of the Wake?'6 Electric power and the further evolution of mechanization are natural outgrowths of the trio of chemistry, mathematics, and mechanics. Awareness of machinery, science, and technology as aspects of the everyday world of contemporary humankind abounds in Finnegans Wake. All sorts of processes and machines play a role in the 'retelling' of the Wake, although those processes and machines having to do with everyday communication occupy a primary place. The new world of communication technology, the new modes of popular culture, and electrified mechanization held a particular attraction for an author reconstructing the virtual life of an 'Everybody' (HCE), for the multiple imaginary actions which take place in this night world also retrace the social evolution of technology. If Joyce called himself an engineer, he was first and foremost a poetic engineer utilizing mechanics, mathematics, and chemistry in designing a 'Nichtian glossery' (FW83.1Q), just as earlier he had developed a schematic chart for constructing the

James Joyce and the 'Modern'

11

complex macro-structural design of Ulysses. To further understand what Joyce meant by 'seriolcosmically' (FW263.24) describing himself as 'the greatest engineer,' three aspects of his use of this concept of engineering should be considered: first, he viewed his books as types of machines and approached their construction as an engineer; second, Ulysses and the Wake refer to many aspects of professional engineering — chemistry, mechanics, mathematics, geography, and strategic planning;27 finally, Joyce realized that the arts and modes of communication of the period during which he was writing Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (1915-39) were extensively mixed up in new modes of social organization and of technological production, reproduction, and distribution that required a new exploration of the relation of all poetic communication to the 'machinic.' Calling poetic communication 'machinic' stresses how all artefactual machinery is first and foremost socially grounded. Poetic communication, like the 'machinic,' is an assemblage that stresses the diagrammatic and the designed, which is technically achieved only when the social machine is prepared. Awareness of the social role of such machinic phenomena as the urban metropolis, the medicalized body of organs, the dream work, or the cinematic production freed Joyce from the organic thinking of Romanticism and the mechanistic thinking of Cartesianism. Joyce often spoke about composing the Wake as if it were an engineering project, while simultaneously viewing this process of composition humorously, much as Swift treated the activities of the Laputian projectors in Gulliver's Travels: In the meantime I am preparing for it ... by pulling down more earthwork. The gangs are now hammering on all sides. It is a bewildering business. I want to do as much as I can before the execution. Complications to right of me, complications to left of me, complex on the page before me, perplex in the pen beside me, duplex in the meandering eyes of me. And from time to time I lie back and listen to my hair growing white.28

These gangs, which he regarded as tunnelling under a mountain from different directions, carry out a mining operation worthy of a mole. When August Suter asked him about the title of the book he was working on, Joyce replied, 'I don't know. It is like a mountain that I tunnel into from every direction, but I don't know what I will find.'29 Building, burrowing, constructing, surveying, planning 'machinic' activities appropriate for an engineer - are just as primary components of the Wake as language, legend, and myth. Structuralist theory would seem to challenge the notion that the alchemistry of the poet or artist can be called engineering. Claude Levi-Strauss made the now well-known distinction between the bricoleur, the jack-of-all-trades, and the engineer by relating bricolage to the manipulation of signs and engineering to the manipulation of concepts. He does concede that 'the difference is therefore less

12 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics absolute than it might appear. It remains a real one, however, in that the engineer is always trying to make his way out of and go beyond the constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization, while the "bricoleur" by inclination or necessity always remains within them. Joyce's discussion of his 'complex-perplex-duplex' certainly strikes one as the workings of bricolage. But two problems must be stressed: first, like many semioticians, Joyce does not accept LeVi-Strauss's separation of sign and concept derived from Saussure; second, both Ulysses and the Wake do try to go beyond the constraints of the particular historical moment. The Joycean engineer, like the figure of the pragmatic engineer of the early twentieth century, encompasses the talents of the bricoleur as well as the design and planning characteristic of the engineer. In the process of composition, Joyce begins with relatively abstract designs of stories, locales, and allegories. He then complicates them by successive, frequently serendipitous, verbal accretions; transverse intertextuality; and multiplex overlayerings. In so doing, he chooses existing images and elements of sound and sense and then teases and recombines them through radical transformations and through the construction of ambivalent combinations. In this manner, he associates the systematic methods of the engineer, who, seeking for new solutions, 'questions the universe,' with those of the bricoleur, who makes do with what is provided. This combination brings into play the exteriority of the engineer's construction and manipulation with the inferiority of the serendipity and intuitiveness of bricolage, which is as evident in the crafted construction and interiority of Ulysses as of the Wake The merging of the bricoleur with the engineer in some ways resembles the effect of the polyphonic novel, as described by Bakhtin, where the fragmented voices and the sleights-of-hand by which they are combined are themselves an interplay of planning and bricolage. Joyce s merger necessarily constructs a world where order is in interplay with disorder, producing a chaos that still has a kind of intelligibility. Shem, the figure of the poet in the Wake, is 'reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos' (186.3-5). This account of poetic composition complements Joyce's 'seriolcosmic' vision, which will be explored in detail later. This cosmos which the new technologies reveal is actually a 'chaosmos,' an ordered disorder that Joyce had intuited before twentieth-century physics discovered the complementarity (Bohr) or uncertainty (Heisenberg) principle in 1927, or the more recent chaos theories of complexity and chaos. This disorder implicit in technological transformation leads Joyce to establish the modern method as vivisective, rather than, like Benjamin, surgical. In 1926 Benjamin allusively dedicated One-Way Street to his mistress, Asja Lacis, who initiated him into Communism: 'This street is named Asja Lacis Street after her who as an engineer cut it through the author.' This complimentary trope suggests that she inspired his work through an act of engineering by surgically re-embodying within

James Joyce and the 'Modern'

13

him a poetic socialist understanding of the city from which his literary vision is produced. By 1926 James Joyce, 'the greatest engineer,' writing his Work in Progress, is vivisectively constructing 'a commodius vicus of recirculation' (L. view = street, village) (3.2) - his 'Vico road [that] goes round and round to meet where terms begin' (452.21-2) - a road which cuts through his readers, both his producers and consumers. These two quite dissimilar works, One Way Street and Finnegans Wake, both owe debts to surrealism (the liberating of self through intoxication) and to photomontage. Joyce's project is in many ways similar to what Benjamin outlines as surrealism: 'the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination ... resides in a profane illumination, as materialistic, anthropological inspiration.'31 To achieve this, Joyce (like the Dadaists and surrealists) pierces, probes, and palpates peoples bodies ('Here Comes Everybody') and the extended body of the metropolis ('dear, dirty Dublin'). While Benjamin, with his mixture of Frankfurt socialism and Jewish mysticism, speaks of this as exemplifying how the avant-garde executes a kind of literary surgery, years earlier Joyce as a socialist-anarchist and a hermetic exCatholic spoke about his method as Vivisection.' The Wake plays with verbal transformations of vivisection, autopsy, and surgery. For example, HCE in one of his multiplicity of manifestations is a 'heaviest corpsus exemption' (362.17), because he is simultaneously a textual corpus in a literary work, a human person (a corpus), and a deceased body (a corpse). Such a playful crossing of vivisection and surgical suturing occurs in the episode depicting the children's play hour - the 'Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies.' HCE, who interrupts his children playing a game in their nursery, is decribed as a god: 'vrayedevraye Blankdeblank, god of all machineries and tomestone of Barnstaple, by mortisection or vivisuture, splitten up or recompounded ... how accountibus for him, moreblue?' (253.33—6). 'Mortisection,' autopsy, which plays on Vivisection' and on the surgical Vivisuture,' introduces a complex of cuttings of the corpse or corpus. The vivisective questioning of the appearance of this paternalistic, dominating figure is interlinked with surgical implications of inquests and operations; with the process of decomposition (or deconstruction) and reconstruction; the burial of the dead; the theatrical tactic of deus ex machina; books as memorial and artificial memory; the Rabelaisian formula ' Vraybis! vrai Dieu; and the hidden god (Dieu cache') or absent deity. At the beginning of his writing career, Joyce had first set forth in Stephen Hero in scientific-technological terminology his view of the social function of the modern poet, explaining that Vivisection' is the most modern process one can conceive ... The ancient method investigated law with the lantern of justice, morality with the lantern of revelation, art with the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical properties: they transform and disfigure. The mod-

14 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics ern method examines its territory by the light of day ... All modern political and religious criticism dispenses with presumptive States, [and] presumptive Redeemers and Churches, [and] It examines the entire community in action and reconstructs the spectacle of redemption. (5M86)

This process, which is clearly experimental in nature and surgical in technical execution, permits the satiric poet to demystify religious illumination and to reveal the arts by which people are being ruled. While Joyce as a satiric poet reconstructing the 'spectacle of redemption' finds his archetype in Daedalus, inventor and designer of the labyrinth, he performs that role in full consciousness of the ambivalence of being 'modern.' The poet of the Wake's orientation is clearly modern, for HCE, the innkeeper anti-hero, is 'as modern as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute' (309.14-15), while the young Shem learns 'from that ancient tongue to be middle old modern to the minute' (270.18), for 'this is modeln times' (289.F6) when 'Wonderlawn's lost us for ever' (270.19-20). The modern method grounded in 'the light of day' ends up with Joyce's using his carefully concocted and crafted night language, which is negating and nihilistic (his 'Nichtian glossery'), for a mimetic performance of a waking dreamland. This dreamland is a night world bathed in illumination. While John Bishop in Joyce's Book of the Dark has exhaustively shown the dark side of the night world, paradoxically, light is a critical element of this night world — in fact, the complexity of the nature of light is central to the nature of the Wake. The language of the night is not the inverse of day language, for it includes day language and adds to it: night is not just dream, but inebriation, imagination, ecstasy, and death; it is that loss of self which is a type of communication. In a letter to his close associate Frank Budgen, Joyce explains how the critical section near the end of the Wake that involves the debate between the Archdruid and Saint Patrick before the High King of Ireland about the nature of light is 'the defence and indictment of the book itself, Berkeley's theory of colours and Patrick's practical solution to the problem.'32 This debate counterpoints a 'pragmatic' theological theory about the nature of light, in which Saint Patrick presents a medley of common sense and Catholic apologetics against a 'magical' philosopho-scientific theory which the Archdruid, mimicking Helmholtz ('hemhaltshealing' [611.28]) and Berkeley ('BilkillyBelkelly' [611.27]), expounds. Although we will return in chapter 11 to look at this encounter in greater detail, it should be noted now that the concluding degradation of the Archdruid s defecating on the 'lamp of Jeeshees' (612.32-3)33 deliberately secularizes the sacred associations of light by a conclusion which emphasizes lower bodily parts - the colon and the ass. Throughout the Wake, Joyce reconstructs English as a polylingual language that is simultaneously lavish, over-abundant, inclusive, and immoderate - a language of

James Joyce and the 'Modern'

15

excess. But like the hieroglyphs of'engined Egypsians' (355.23), this production is a lingua ex machina. The Joycean language of 'blasphematory spits' (183.24) is a language of excess and transgression, which, like Bataille's linguistic vision of excess, is constructed within a theory and practice of cultural production in a technological era. Choosing to combine the 'waking' of a corpse with the night life of an Irish pub provides one set of parameters for probing the role of the sacred in a rationalized techno-cultural world. Joyce's use of an Irish wake, a specific folk mortuary custom, establishes comedy, intoxication, and transgression as some of the central foci of his book. While Joyce designs the Wake and crafts its particular language in order to explore the new techno-culture, one important aspect of his design is to investigate the metamorphoses of the sacred in such an era of technologization. A materialist culture still needs modalities for coming to terms with the problem of discontinuity and death; since the new techno-culture is itself an extension of the embodied mind and a transformation of nature, it can be the ground for new modes of ritual and sacrifice and new ways of elaborating the play of eros and thanatos. Linking the concept of intoxication to that of a dream and profane illumination is an aspect of Joyce's project which is similar to Benjamin's account of the programmatic of surrealism. The deliberate blasphemy made possible through the blending of orgiastic revels, the symbolic eating of the corpse, communal inebriation, and the Eucharist opens up an exploration of eroticism, sacrifice, and the sacred similar to Bataille's account of eroticism as an individual/collective awareness of death and the basis for 'an-other' type of ontology. This desacralization of the word is paralleled by a resacralization of the world and the body, which involves a bridging of nature, culture, and technology. The desire andjouissance which abound throughout the Wake are essential to this liberatory project, in which all of the implicit and explicit obscenity is valued as it would be in the work of Bataille, but a Bataille filtered through a Rabelaisian conception of the carnivalesque and integrated with the dominant activities associated with contemporary techno-culture. Within the context of surrealism, expressionism, and other avant-garde movements, Joyce uses dream, montage, and shock to transform the way language should be viewed in a new world of Verbivocovisual presentments' (.FW341.19), a language that will celebrate the marriage of erotic transgression and global technologization and metamorphosize genre and literary form. Grounding his work in the new techno-culture, and particularly the new technologies of production, reproduction, and dissemination, enables Joyce to explore the implications of the loss of cult, aura, and the religious affiliation of art which accompany the new technoculture and to examine how the auraless object of cultural production possesses its own post-Enlightenment magic that opens up new potentialities for profane liturgies and secularized sacraments.

2 Art as Vivisection: The Encyclopaedic Mechanics of Menippean Satire

A commitment to an avant-garde, radical modernism did not preclude Joyce from a historical understanding of the importance of the machinic and of the ways in which it had impacted upon art and poetry. Joyce s complex treatment of laughter and the comic in his final two works rises out of a knowledge of poetry as sociopolitical critique at various historic moments: on the one hand, moments that produced anti-clerical satire on the hegemony of church and state and the monopolies of knowledge and dissemination which supported them; on the other, moments that produced resurgence of and transformations of a generic mode directed at exposing the contradictions, dominating power, hypocrisy, and ambivalence of particular epistemic paradigms and their involvement with the science, philosophy, and technology of the periods in which they were ascendant. These two directions complement and interpenetrate one another, undergoing transformations to cope with the social, political, and cultural change at the times when they emerge. Consequently, it is now necessary to turn to some satiric aspects of the medieval poetry of critique which arose at moments of social, cultural, and technological change, and also to examine the long-standing history of a particular form of learned satire which criticized various dominant intellectual paradigms and which Joyce radically transformed in constructing Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. While the former critique of church and state underlies the Joycean transformation of the critique of socio-political power and his utilizing the force of people's bodily exuberance and excess, the latter history of learned satire aided him in transforming this critique of socio-political power into the satire of the advancement and dissemination of knowledge in the emerging techno-culture, while simultaneously demonstrating the complex ambivalence of the new mathematics and science, and of the rising techno-world and its impact on people. True to his early commitment to the importance of comedy, this project is marked by laughter and the satiric stance, though always mitigated by the warm, fleshly underside of humanity. His prefer-

Art as Vivisection

17

ence for the allegorical and for the complex, complicated, multi-layered, and perplexing is the obvious complement to such a project. The idea that laughter has machinic roots was central to some of the major theories of comedy in the early decades of the twentieth century. Henri Bergson's essay on the meaning of the comic stressed the relationship between laughter and the perception of people as mechanisms - 'something mechanical encrusted upon the living.' Two decades later, Wyndham Lewis, a critic of both Bergson and Joyce, also argued that laughter arises from seeing people as machines. 'The root of the comic,' he asserts, 'is to be sought in the sensations resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person. But from this point of view all people are necessarily comic: for they are all things, or physical bodies behaving as persons.' One of Lewis's aphorisms on laughter in The Wild Body aptly describes an aspect of Joycean laughter similar to that articulated by Bataille and many of the avantgarde: 'Laughter is the sudden handshake of mystic violence and the anarchist.'3 In 1934 Lewis, asserting that all modern art which is not the product of'beauty doctors' is satire, appropriated an adage of Hazlitt's, turning it against its author to assert characters in satire are 'machines governed by routine.' In spite of his sharp criticism of Joyce's Ulysses, Lewis still regarded Joyce as an important and 'robust' satirist. The aspect of Leopold Bloom's character that has frequently led some critics to overemphasize his Chaplinesque aspects is how, in some respects not unlike the average person of this time, he manages his life mechanically. Lewis further comments on machinic laughter in the 'Conclusion' of Men without Art, where he asserts that at the present time (i.e., the 1920s and 1930s) 'homo animal ridens is accentuating ... his dangerous, philosophic, "god-like" prerogative — that wild nihilism which is a function of reason and of which his laughter is the characteristic expression.' Lewis continues: And a bird-woman plaster-mask of Picasso - or following Picasso, in a weightier substance, a pin-headed giantess of Mr. Henry Moore ... are, as much as Mr. Joyce's Leopold Bloom, or Cissy Caffrey ... expressions of this tendency. And that is why, by stretching a point, no more, we can without exaggeration write satire for art — not the moralist satire directed at a given society, but a metaphysical satire occupied with mankind.5

Lewis argues that this situation is merely a 'refinement' of our 'mechanical animal condition,' by which he recognizes the crucial importance of the mechanical and the machine for the Joyce era, an aspect which is neatly epitomized in the title of David Hayman's 'Ulysses': The Mechanics of Meaning. Lewis's raising the issue of the affiliation of art with the machinic, and Bergsons associating laughter with the machinic, highlights why Joyce would regard himself as an engineer making poetic machines. It also assists in understanding Joyce's view

18

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

of the superior power of comedy and laughter, his practice of satire, and his interest in specific aspects of the satiric tradition (e.g., as represented by Apuleius, Petronius, Erasmus, Ben Jonson, Pope, Swift, Sterne, and the later Rabelais). Two particular moments in the history of satire that are quite relevant to Finnegans Wake focus either on technology and popular culture, or on the satire of church and/or state, while celebrating the more sensuous and fundamentally physical aspects of the body. These two moments were marked by epistemic satires directed at the 'authority' of new paradigms of knowledge, their associated sciences and technologies, and their practical implications: high medieval satire, as it is diversely represented in Dante and the aftermath of Goliardic poetry; and eighteenth-century English satire as practised by Pope, Swift, and Sterne. Both movements occur at moments of significant social, technological, and paradigmatic change: first, the high medieval, a period of flourishing technological growth marked by the Gothic cathedrals, the invention of mechanical devices, and new modes for producing manuscripts;6 and second, the early eighteenth century immediately after the development of the relatively new, post-Cartesian mechanical philosophy, Newton's optics and Principia, and the beginnings of the industrial revolution, all with their immense philosophical and social implications. This chapter will explore how aspects of both of these moments are important for Joyce, who updates and transforms them into a unique radical modernist revision of Menippean satire. The high medieval as a mode of political and ecclesiastical critique, emphasizing in the case of Goliardic satire the materiality of humanity, has a special relationship to the socio-political situation of an expatriated Irish writer in contemporary Europe. Neo-classicism, arising with the beginnings of modernity by transforming satire into a complex epistemic critique of the new power of science and its impact on society, the arts, and learning (particularly through new technologies affecting the book and the transmission of learning), provides Joyce with a way to probe the Cartesian spring ('Sink deep or touch not the Cartesian spring!' [/7W301.25]). This critique, occurring at the beginning of modernity, is metamorphosized into a radical modernist critique of the technoculture of contemporary science and technology in the early twentieth century. Just like the early twentieth century, both of these moments also raise the problem relative to their times of what it means to be a modernus, a modern. Joyce's purpose is not to indicate some kind of traditional preoccupation with allusions, but the use of a knowledge of the history of satire to effect a modern transformation that will probe the new acceleration and domination of scientific knowledge and technology and associate them with a critique of new relationships of church, state, and the international community evolving within the techno-cultural revolution. Benjamin, who saw in Bertolt Brecht s epic theatre the consummate art of this new techno-cultural era, comments that 'it is with Marx that Brecht has gone to

Art as Vivisection

19

school. Satire, which has always been a materialist art, has with Brecht become a dialectical one.'7 Joyce developed a more complex, post-Marxian materialist art. In the Wake, he parodically employs Giordano Bruno's and Nicholas of Cusa's dialectic philosophy to go beyond a dialectic art and satirically reassemble 'the dialytically separated elements of precedent decomposition for the verypetpurpose of subsequent recombination' to manifest the 'heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past' (FW614.34-6). (Note the association of HCE with the present, and ALP with the past.) 'Dialytically' is a genuine techno-scientific term recognized by the dictionary as the adverbial form of'dialysis,' but here by wordplay it includes 'dialectic' as well as 'dialysis,' the separation of smaller molecules from larger molecules or of dissolved substances from colloidal particles in a solution by selective diffusion through a semi-permeable membrane, which is used in hemodialysis as a technique of purifying the blood. This dialectic, differentiating (i.e., by diffusion), purificational, and mechanical process is reminiscent of the role that the youthful Joyce adopted in The Holy Office (1904), where he had proclaimed that he was an 'enemy' (as Lewis also did in describing himself as 'The Enemy') or a 'destructive character' (as Benjamin described Karl Kraus). Joyce performs a satiric and sanitative role, which is also machinic, denominating himself'Katharsis-Purgative,' for ... all these men of whom I speak Make me the sewer of their clique That they may dream their dreamy dreams I carry off their filthy streams

(PS W9 8)

Standing 'self-doomed, unafraid,' flashing his 'antlers on the air,' the Joycean poet cognitively 'distantiates' himself, as Brecht had done,8 using the 'poet's grammar book' in the everyday world of the tavern and brothel (PSW97, 11. 6, 10) to develop a heterodox, revolutionary poetic model of cognitive and metaphysical satire: For every true born mysticist A Dante is unprejudiced Who safe at ingle-nook by proxy Hazards extremes of heterodoxy

(PSW97,11.15-19)

A retrospective gloss on those who hazard Dantesque 'extremes of heterodoxy' is provided by the title of Samuel Beckett's opening essay in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, the collection of critical commentary sponsored by Joyce on the earliest published fragments of what eventually

20

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

became Finnegans Wake. Beckett entitled his essay 'Dante ... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce.' Since Joyce manipulated the content and oversaw the publication of the Exagmination, the title epitomizes Joyce's satiric intellectual project and substantiates his claim that he was the greatest engineer, for as Eugene Jolas observes in his contribution to Our Exagmination, 'The Revolution of Language and James Joyce,' this new artist 'attempts to hammer out a verbal vision that destroys time and space,' and that when the modernist era is seen in perspective 'this disintegration of words and their subsequent reconstruction on other planes constitute some of the most important acts of our epoch. Joyce's early poem The Holy Office (1904) invites comparison with the twelfthcentury Archpoet's Confessio.10 One of the greatest of Goliardic poets, who is typ cal of the imaginary members of the mythical ordo vagantes (wandering scholars), the Archpoet's Confessio founded a genre.11 Probably the greatest drinking song of all time, it is 'the first defiance by the artist of that society which it is his thankless business to amuse' l — a materialistically oriented satire dedicated to the triumph of the sensuous body over hypocrisy and monopolization of knowledge by the established clerisy. While it is improbable that Joyce knew this work in 1904, when he began his self-imposed exile in Europe, there were fourteenth-century Irish exemplars of such poetry and there are other high medieval echoes in the Holy Office, including comparisons of Joyce's work to Aquinas and Dante. Joyce could readily relate to the vagrant, oppositional, transgressive mode of the satiric poet as agent of social change, undertaking an international mission that is a critical revision of the Irish emigrant intellectual tradition of Roman times and the Middle Ages, to which Joyce referred in his lectures on Ireland delivered in Trieste.13 Dante, and to a lesser extent the Archpoet, provide examples of precursors to Joyce's conception of the poet as an assembler, engineer, or mechanic, for in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance the concept of the poet as a type of artificer (such as a builder or architect) was paramount. Dante's crafting of a new language, his fascination with poetic and rhetorical technique, his social satire, his selfexegesis, and his awareness of his role as an innovator all find echoes in Joyce's own project. Dante and the Archpoet also share with Joyce being moderni with respect to their moment in history. This designation of artists as ancient or 'modern' (modernus) goes back to the sixth century and to the even earlier idea in ancient Greece and Rome that some artists were 'new' (i.e., neotert), in contradistinction to the ancients who preceded them. The distinction, though, took on a peculiar urgency after the twelfth century with the overt recognition of the querelle des anciens et modernes in the work of Alan of Lille.14 But Joyce, like Dante, hedges the sense of his modernism with his own conception and reinterpretation of the classical as distinct from the ancient. His interpretation of the ancient-modern axis does not parallel the classical-Romantic (or

Art as Vivisection

21

non-classical) duality. As early as the Stephen Hero manuscript, this notion of the classical appears, for if vivisection is the modern method in contradistinction from the ancient, the classical temper is not identified with the ancient: A classical style, he said, is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country: it is a constant state of the artistic mind... The classical temper ... ever mindful of limitations, chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered. (SH78-9)

For Joyce, as for Dante, a modern work could also be classical, for this latter quality is a question of a 'temper' not that of a periodization.15 Clearly Joyce s modernity, with its vivisective technique, 'bends upon these present things' and works upon them with 'quick intelligence.' Motifs about engineering and mechanics, about being modern and about having a classical temper, are closely related with the 'ancient legacy of the past' (FW614.36—615.1) — for example, Dante, Leonardo — and with Joyce's project, which, while modern, is the 'seim anew' (FW215.23). Joyce, as indicated by the allusive intertextuality of Ulysses and the Wake, constructs his particular ancient legacy of the past by borrowing and transforming techniques and topics from the High Middle Ages, the early, anti-scholastic Renaissance (Rabelais), and dissident, satiric neo-classicism (Ben Jonson, Pascal, Pope, Sterne, and Swift). Joyce associated himself with the figure of the alienated, critical intellectual as evidenced in the comparisons with Dante and other heretical figures, and in his own vocation as a 'wandering scholar-poet.' His self-imposed exile partly signalled his belief that within the Ireland of 1904 it was impossible to achieve a rebirth of intellectuality, artistic significance, and of individual independence and integrity that would free Ireland from cultural colonization by both England and Rome. Shaped and formed as a youth within the remnants of an early Christian intellectuality melded with more ancient beliefs inherited from the Celts, which he appreciated but had to reject, Joyce envisioned his role was to modernize, revise, and secularize witty Aristotle, Dante, Scotus Erigena, Duns Scotus, and Aquinas (the latter having had, according to Joyce, an Irishman named Petrus Hibernus as his theology professor), and to disseminate these intellectual perceptions throughout other lands. His lifelong self-imposed exile is more like a mission to the Philistines than a punitive banishment. In Ulysses and the Wake, Joyce as allegorist, melancholic, and jester, a contemporary metamorphosis of Erasmus of the Encomium Moriae or Pope of The Dunciad, is constructing a learned, philosophic, encyclopaedic satire directed at specific con-

22

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

temporary epistemes. While such learned satire existed from the classical world through the Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, certain aspects of this tradition that developed in the neo-classical period of the Enlightenment can be distinguished by the particularly strong affiliation they have with the topics of mediated communication, mass information, and the beginnings of mass mechanization. The Wake alludes to aspects of all the major examples of such work from the eighteenth century in Ireland and Great Britain: Swift's A Tale of a Tub (including The Battle of the Books and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit); Pope's and Swift's Scriblerus Club program (including The Art of Sinking in Poetry, The Dunciad Variorum, and Gulliver's Travels); Sterne's Tristram Shandy. He transforms their strategies and techniques in order to probe contemporary technologies, especially mathematics, the new science, and electro-mechanization, as exemplified in such passages as: 'A flink dab for a freck dive and a stern poise for a swift pounce was frankily at the manual arith ...' (FW282.7-9) or 'the graphplot... may be invoked into the zeroic couplet, palls pell inhis heventh glike noughty times °° (FW284.6 11). This carnivalesque, allegorical satire, a metamorphosis of Menippean satire, consciously utilizes the 'machinic' nature of laughter to mould a satiric machine and to investigate what Joyce found to be the inadequacies of the episteme admired by the 'cultic twalette' (.FW344.12) and other I'artpour Van movements in comprehending the centrality, as well as exploring the ambivalent paradoxes, of the newly emerging techno-culture. In so doing, he emphasizes the importance of understanding contemporary constructs from cities to machines to cultural productions as assemblages, collections of fetishized objects and social constructions. The Wake consciously transforms language to explore and critique a situation where 'television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!' (52.18-19). In Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Joyce consciously uses the generic transformations of Menippean satire from Lucian through Rabelais and Erasmus to their association in the eighteenth century with the satiric critique of Cartesianism, mechanism, fideism, and the emergence of a new science, its accompanying technology, and socio-political impact. An essential element of Joyce's techno-poetics involved designing a radical modernist metamorphosis of this learned satire, for Joyce's new complex parodic transformations of this genre obviously are responding to contemporary radical transformations within twentieth-century techno-culture. Joyce appears to have been quite aware of the significant critical purpose of such learned satire and its relevance to transitions in fundamental epistemic paradigms, both through his own reading of the works and through his likely acquaintance with John Dryden's description of Varronian (more commonly described today as Menippean) satire in A Discourse Concerning Satire.'1 This genre had attracted many authors whom

Art as Vivisection

23

Joyce includes in the Wake. Subsequent to Dryden's own Varronian satires, Abaslom and Achitophel' and 'Macflecknoe,' it was adapted by Swift, Pope, and Sterne, who transformed the genre further in order to explore Cartesianism, Newtonianism, and other manifestations of the 'mechanical operation of the spirit,' such as the advent of printing as a mass medium. Paradigmatic crises appear to have favoured the emergence of new metamorphoses of Menippean satire:17 the beginnings of Christianity, with Petronius and Apuleius; the transition from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance, with Rabelais and Erasmus and the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum; and the Enlightenment, with Swift, Pope, and Sterne. The paradigmatic moment for Joyce's era is the peaking of high modernism, and his particular target is the ideology that links post-Enlightenment thought (the industrial state, the transnational postindustrial economy, and technological rationalization), scientific positivism, and the dominance of Christian theology (the Roman and English Catholic Churches). To recall that in the English and Irish Enlightenment world this learned satire was called Varronian, rather than Menippean, satire is not intended to be quixotic, for it calls attention to three major factors that must be taken into account when speaking of the theoretical orientation of Joyces practice subsequent to the popularization within literary theory of Frye's, Bakhtin's, and Kristeva s theoretical explications of the Menippean, and of the dialogic aspects of Rabelais. First, it recalls that a well-recognized Menippean tradition had existed from the classical period, identified by Varro's having entitled a work Satirae Menippeae, and that this was well recognized in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European literature. Consequently, Joyce, with his Jesuit classical education, could clearly recognize and develop a distinct interpretation of the Menippean strand existing in literary works with which he was familiar, including those of many medieval, Renaissance Latin, and sixteenth- to eighteenth-century vernacular European satirists, even though he could not have been aware of Bakhtin's theories (published in 1940) asserting the importance of such historical works. Secondly, 'Varronian' highlights the differences implicit in the English neoAugustan, Enlightenment transformations of this learned satire by writers who were aware of Dryden's essay on satire. In their work, Swift, Pope, the Scriblerins, and, to an extent, Sterne showed they were particularly conscious of newly developing historical and textual scholarship, the new scientific paradigms, the beginnings of mass culture, and the early stages of mass mechanization, particularly in the publishing industry. In the same group of works, Swift, Pope, and Sterne's adapting learned satire to the critique of intellectual paradigms, a function which is implicit in Rabelais, Erasmus, and other earlier Renaissance satirists, is further intensified by their employing allusions to esoteric rituals associated with preChristian and gnostic mystery religions to undertake specific criticisms of contem-

24

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

porary religious enthusiasms.18 Finally, this approach grounds the use of such generic strategies within the context of modernity, for Dryden is using satiric strategies to critique and explore the ambiguities of Enlightenment fideism that in later eighteenth-century writers are extended to embrace Cartesianism and Newtonian science. Joyce transforms these strategies into a post-Enlightenment celebration of an 'everybody' leading an 'everyday' existence in a post-electric world where new enthusiastic devotions to nationalism and piety are emerging, but, as Nietzsche declared, 'God is dead.' Joyce's extensive interest in certain Renaissance and eighteenth-century satirists, particularly in Finnegans Wake, should be related in part to his interest in contemporary techno-culture and science. Radical modernist Varronian satire provides a deliberately engineered or designed language that permits writing to occupy a new, unique role in probing and critiquing the social unconscious which is complementary and supplementary to the new technological means of production, reproduction, and dissemination. Satires such as those of Rabelais, Pope, Swift, and Sterne were poetic epistemological critiques. While in the case of the latter three writers they are critiques of science, mechanization, and the beginnings of a mass audience, even Rabelais's Gargantua could be related to Heidegger's assertion that the essence of modern technology precedes modern physical science.19 This thesis is central to Joyce's project, since he is fascinated with Giordano Bruno, whose writings, along with other Renaissance hermeticists (e.g., Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee, etc.) - as Frances Yates demonstrates20 - prefigure modern science. Joyce radically modifies such learned satire to critique contemporary technology, science, and the epistemic priority of technology in the 'magical.' There are complex allegorical aspects both to Dante and to these works of learned satire. In The New Science Vico, attributing a major role to allegory in poetic wisdom, notes that allegory is an essential aspect of 'poetic logic.' Vico believed mythologies to be allegories corresponding to the fables, so that 'these allegories must have been etymologies of the poetic languages.'21 In the Wake Joyce demonstrates a fascination with hieroglyphs, runes, heraldic shields, emblems, and the like, which provide complex, multi-layered allegorical frameworks for the multitude of 'tales all tolled' about the Earwicker family. Allegory's affinity with the works of the avant-garde and other radical modernist artists has been well established in the writings of Benjamin, who developed a sophisticated theory of allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama,22 as an antidote to the postRomantic, traditional modernist stress on symbolism. For Joyce as for Benjamin, the contemporary materialist poet as producer of satiric allegory is a melancholic.23 The very preoccupation of the Wake with night, dream, and death leads to natural associations with melancholia that are reinforced by the Wakes describing the popular poet Hosty as 'setting on a twoodstool on the

Art as Vivisection

25

verge of selfabyss, most starved, with melancholia over everything in general' (40.24); by calling the poet, Shem the Penman, 'Mr. Melancholy Slow' (56.30); and even by describing the father figure, HCE, as a melancholic plagued with liver problems which are supposed to accompany such a state: One feared for his days. Did there yawn? 'Twas his stommick. Eruct? The libber. A gush? From his visuals. Pung? Deliwer him, orelode! He had laid violent hands on himself, it was brought in Fuggers Newsletter, lain down, all in, fagged out, with equally melancholy death. (97.29-34) Shem as melancholic poet is fixated on the singularity of particular fetishized objects with which his walls and flooring are 'persianly literatured'; or the impediments to his literary productivity such as 'the murky light, the botchy print, the tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers, the foxtrotting fleas, the lieabed lice, the scum on his tongue, the drop in his eye' (180.17-20). To the roles already mentioned in The Holy Office of philosopher, satirist, and sewer cleaner, Joyce as poet also performs the traditional shamanic role of trickster, jester, or clown, for Joyce is constructing a work which proclaims, 'Outragedy of poetscalds! Acomedy of letters!' (PW425.24). That the roles of engineer, philosopher, jester, satirist, and sewer cleaner are interlinked becomes apparent in the description of the book as 'the drame of Drainophilias' (110.11), or the description of how Shem the poet 'winged away on a wildgoup's chase across the kathartic ocean and made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of his wit's waste' (185-5-8), followed by a detailed passage in Latin of a parodic technological process of turning shit into ink. When Joyce speaks of Katharsis-Purgative, it is not a question of an emotional catharsis, but a hard-edged satiric and critical purging ('dialytically') by the physical debasement of those aspects of the European world characterized by Mammon and Leviathan. Such a vision necessarily is satiric, utilizing burlesque, farce, lampoon, irony, parody, raillery, and ridicule, for while 'Postmartem is the goods,' 'Jollification [is] a tight second' (455.12). The writings of'jameymock farceson in Shemish' (423.1) constitute his 'farced epistol to the hibruws' (228.33-4), an epistle to the highbrows, which in context is also an epi-stool, for it is 'foull subustioned mullmud' (228.33) from a 'dear home trashold on the raging canal' (228.31). In a vignette of self-portraiture, Joyce presents himself as 'waggy' (301.14) 'dear old Erosmas' (301.F5), whose persona is that of a 'sorrafool' or sorrowful fool lamenting. 'And trieste, ah trieste ate I my liver!' This veritable 'mister-mysterion' or mystery man must employ bathos (or the debased bathos that is the depths to which one must sink to touch the Cartesian spring!) to probe and portray the urban techno-cultures of Dublin, Ireland, and Europe, using their own mathemat-

26 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics ical and technological structures, for while he is sorrowful or 'diesmal... lying low on his rawside laying siege to goblin castle' (301.26-7), he also exhibits hilarity for 'how hyenesmeal he was laying him long on his laughside' (301.28-9). Like Erasmus, Joyce's anima, which is 'animal,' earthy, is the classic jester in sadness gay and in gaiety sad, counterpointing eros to thanatos. His melancholia lasts day after day throughout the week: 'All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law' (301.20-2), for he is a 'sadfellow ' and he is 'floored on his plankraft of shittim wood' (301.23-4). This obsession with particularities produces a state of intoxication that Benjamin had associated with the avant-garde, particularly the surrealists.27 So Shem, as partly a parody of Joyce writing his earlier works such as A Portrait or Ulysses, is 'to answer all the diddies in one dedal' (179.17), a writer who 'had flickered up and flinnered down into a drug and drunkery addict, growing megalomane of a loose past' (179.20-1), intoxicated on particularities as well as drugs and alcohol.28 Examples of such intoxication with particulars abound in book I, chapter 7, in descriptions like that of the walls and flooring of Shem s lair, which is 'persianly literatured' with such objects as: ... burst loveletters, telltale stories, stickyback snaps, doubtful eggshells, bouchers, flints, borers, puffers, amygdaloid almonds, rindless raisins, alphybettyformed verbage, vivlical viasses, ompiter dictas, visus umbique, ahems and ahahs, imeffible tries at speech unasyllabled, you owe mes, eyoldhyms, fluefoul smut, fallen lucifers, vestas which had served, showered ornaments, borrowed brogues, reversibles jackets ... (183.11-17)

This list, occupying a full page, is a parody of images of commodity fetishism, and in a manner similar to the Rabelaisian catalogues that Bakhtin describes as a prime characteristic of the carnivalesque, it is congruent with capitalist modernity's preoccupation with fetishized objects.29 If such inventories are very prevalent in Joyce (e.g., lists of titles such as the one at the opening of the 'Mamafesta' section [1.5]), this is entirely in keeping with the avant-garde and modernist fascination with collections of objects. In Ulysses, Joyce interrelates the shape of the contemporary city as a technologi cal assemblage of objects and events, the understanding of the body as a machine, and a technically oriented understanding of the arts to develop the distancing effect (distanciation) provided by the comic framework. Benjamin, who appreciated the contemporary importance of the city to avant-garde artists, noted that for the surrealists 'at the centre of this world of things stands the most dreamed-of of their objects, the city of Paris itself (emphasis added). He extends this insight to include any contemporary city for, as he immediately goes on to point out, 'but only revolt exposes its surrealist face (deserted streets in which whistles and shots dictate the outcome). And no face is as surrealistic as the true face of a city.'30 This

Art as Vivisection

27

is partly why Dublin is so central in Joyce's writing. While Joyces work stands beside and beyond surrealism, as Klee's does with respect to expressionism and Duchamp's to Dadaism, Benjamin in speaking of surrealism is speaking of a radical modernist experience arising from urbanization, the new electro-technology, and the new political forces of the left. The focus for Joyces Menippean allegory is an individual body, which is an archetype of a collective everybody, interacting with its techo-cultural environment - a 'Here Comes Everybody' or a Leopold Bloom. Bloom's comic encounters with the things of his techno-culture characterize the life of a man who has devoted his life to sales and advertising; HCE as innkeeper of a suburban Dublin pub is a working-class version of such a sales-and-promotion type who also encounters the things of his techno-culture while interacting more directly with the workers who are his neighbours in Chapelizod. Joyce's structural charts illustrate how this takes place within the action of Ulysses, while the very ambiguity between the sleep of the night and the sleep of death, a dreamer and a corpse (as well as a corpus], makes more obscure and complex the way this process of interaction within the urbanized world is developed in Finnegans Wake. Bloom's and HCE's bodies, including their sensory and nervous systems, interpenetrate with the optical, acoustic, and proprioceptive images generated by contemporary techno-culture. Joyce s treatment of this so-called inner world, which includes elements of comedy, satire, and allegory that arise within the natural modes of each individual's bodily encounter in the world, involves a technique for associating the mind-body, making sense out of its fragmented world. Bloom, thinking back on Paddy Dignam's death as he passes through the press room in the 'Aeolus' episode (VII), associates the printing presses and the human machine: This morning the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam. Machines. Smash a man to atoms if they got him caught. Rule the world today. His machineries are pegging away too. Like these, got out of hand: fermenting. Working away, tearing away. And that old grey rat tearing to get in. (t/7.80-4)

The mimicry of the machines working away in the background shapes the rhythm and rhetoric as well as the treatment of the subject of Bloom's meditation. The motif of the press as part of a mechanized world parallels the interpretation of the body and nature itself as mechanized. The reductio involved generates a sense of black comedy, while the vision of the mechanized world is ambivalently presented. The opening of the 'Lestrygonians' episode uses the same general strategies, here applied to the gastro-intestinal system awakening to the demands of lunch hour: Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugarsticky girl shovelling scoopfuls of creams for a Christian brother. Some school treat. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit man-

28 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics ufacturer to His Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne sucking red jujubes white. (£78.1-4)

The particularities enumerated in each example underline the body's encounter with things and the impact of these things (fetishized commodities, as dramatized in the example of the king sucking the red jujubes made by a manufacturer who has received a royal endorsement) on body and image interpenetrating with technology, whether it be the machinery of the presses or the mass distribution of comfits for the digestive machinery of Dublin's collectivity. Embodying his society, Bloom provides a natural, tactile basis for consummating a modernized metamorphosis of the Menippean vision. Since the literary world had lived through a Romantic period and socio-political and economic conditions had radically changed, Joyce is constructing new genres by transforming Menippean exempla. He reinterprets, as Benjamin had also done somewhat differently, the allegorical tradition within a dark comedy about the contemporary everyday world. His selection of the comic epic to explore the world and nature of a contemporary Odysseus is made on grounds similar to Benjamins analysis of the merging of epic and allegory when he discusses epic in relation to the sorrow-play, or Brecht's adapting the term 'epic' to his new, non-Aristotelian theatre. Epic is selected as an intentional tactic for making the action of Bloom s wanderings cognitively estranged3 in order to allow the reader to assess both the characters and their techno-cultural society. Joyce s discussions with Budgen about the composition of Ulysses delineate his very specific decision to employ an epic analogue — the Odyssey — in which the allegorical bias within the historic transformations of the epic played a specific role. Since this Menippean strain of comic epic had eluded the early critics of Ulysses, the Wake came to be designed as a modernized, encyclopaedic satire, which, among many other functions, serves as a meta-commentary on Ulysses. It assists in demonstrating how in Ulysses the use of the epic form and its allegorical potential provided Joyce with a powerful literary machine with which to embody Bloom's electro-technological life-world, including how it is enmeshed in advertising and promotion and how it transforms our ways of seeing, hearing, sensing, and feeling as well as our understanding of our relations to time and space. Therefore, although he employs most of the carnivalesque strategies outlined in Rabelais and His World, Joyce places a different value on allegory from that posited by Bakhtin, who regarded the seventeenth-century Baroque allegorical tradition as the death of the carnivalesque.33 The strategies of the carnivalesque recur frequently in Ulysses: the rhetorization of commerce, of machinery, and of the press in the 'Aeolus' episode; the epic catalogues in some of the parodies (e.g., the extended scene of the hanging), or in the blasphemous departure of Bloom from the bar as

Art as Vivisection

29

Elijah in the 'Cyclops' episode; the elaborate play with food and drink in the 'Lestrygonians' episode; the medicalization of the birth process through the mechanical play with the history of style in the 'Oxen of the Sun' episode; the elaborate hallucinations that are a carnival of masks and allegorical figures and a recontextualization of 'mystery drama' into segments leading up to the 'upside down' celebration of a Black Mass over Mina Purefoy's body in the 'Circe' episode. Ulysses and the Wakes historical action involves: (1) a reinterpretation of the Rabelaisian and carnivalesque in the wake of de Sade, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx; (2) the terror of mechanized destruction revealed in contemporary warfare (the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the First World War); (3) the beginnings of internationalism; (4) the emergence of politically viable socialism(s) opposing capitalism; (5) the electro-mechanization and technologization of Ireland and Europe. Each of these will be implicated to some extent in examining the primary importance of the new world of machines, media, and communication in the 'modern' milieu as Joyce explored it. To recapitulate: the carnivalesque, allegoric satire that Joyce moulds on the Varronian-Menippean model is consciously a satiric machine utilizing the 'machinic' nature of laughter to investigate what he found to be the contradictions in the epistemic conflicts arising from the new techno-culture's impact on romanticisms such as the Celtic Twilight. The entire techno-culture is criticially examined, for while church, state, and commerce are critiqued in the 'Aeolus' episode, where the press is revealed as allied to the church and to commerce, elsewhere in Ulysses and the Wake Joyce undertakes a complex analysis of the 'progressive' potential of media and other technologies, such as the way radio plays a role in the announcement of an erection, resurrection and revolution, or insurrection in the opening of the final episode of the Wake: 'Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne. Array! Surrection! Eireweeker to the wohld bludyn world. O rally, O rally, O rally! Phlenxty, O rally!' (593.1-4). Nevertheless, these incidents are situated in a satiric context that by its very nature is ambivalent, for it is a complex mixture of 'praise and blame.' This ambivalence of the 'modern' vivisectionist, which is at the core of Joyces 'socialist anarchism,' permeates his practice as a poetic engineer explicating the 'hieroglyphs of engined egypsians.'

3 Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer

Books and telecommunication gadgets, the organs imposed on bodies or the geography imposed on spaces, or meanings imposed across pluralities of signs and gestures are all part of the world of Ulysses, just as they are the very stuff Joyce's dream in the Wake is made of. The body or the body of a book (text) is a surface, a topography, across which a multitude of probabilities play by which that body is inscribed as an assemblage, an abstract machine, just as Molly as moly, the saving mana of Hermes, the god of communication, reassembles and reproduces the action of Ulysses. Joyce as a poet of his era involves popular culture, communicating machines, machinery, and all the signs of the times in his book. The engineering of these communicating machines occupies a role of particular relevance, for they are of three kinds: traditional sign systems (hieroglyphs, alphabets, icons, drawings); technologically mediated modes of reproduction (books, telephones, film); crafted modes of popular expression dependent either on the traditional or the technologically mediated (sermons, pantomimes, riddles, comics). All these are communicating machines which work on the same fundamental principles and they are all co-present in one semiotic system, which is integrated through the remembered co-presence of the mnemonic pyrotechnics of 'Ithaca' (the last words of Bloom) and 'Penelope' (Molly's final thoughts on 17 June). Such a resolution depends on a transverse mode of communication, with the reader's memory moving back and forth across the rhizomic labyrinth that is created by the surface of the text - a poetic machine! In the Wake, Joyce as a poetic engineer uses mechanics, mathematics, and chemistry to design a 'Nichtian glossery' (83.10) - a negative, Nietzschean, night language1 - just as earlier he appears to have developed and utilized a schematic chart for the complex macro-structural design of Ulysses. Furthermore, references to new technologies or scientific theories occur frequently in Finnegans Wake: telegraphy, telephony, photography, the typewriter, the rotary press, electro-

Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer

31

magnetic power, sound recording, electric light, skyscraper construction, moving pictures, radioactivity, wireless, air flight, the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, complementarity theory, and mass mechanization. When his first published novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is viewed retrospectively, Joyce appears to have been preoccupied early in his career with the images of constructors, builders, and other cunning artificers, a pattern which continues on into Ulysses and the Wake. The action of Ulysses takes place in a cityscape one day and night in June and traces the wanderings of a pseudo-artisan, pseudo-hero, the ad salesman Leopold Bloom, a citizen of Dublin. Bloom's wanderings traverse the city space while moving through time. They are associated with specific hours of the day and places, with specific organs of the body, and with specific sign-symbols that parallel specific episodes of the Odyssey. The epic mode is itself fragmented by a multiplicity of stylistic devices. In Ulysses Joyce demonstrates that the contemporary city has become a complex technological construction. The poetic construction of Ulysses mirrors Dublin in the intricate interweaving of technology and society, the most obvious example being the use of trams, commercial vehicles, printing presses, and the devices of rhetoric in the 'Aeolus' episode. This episode, which largely takes place in and around a newspaper office, resonates with echoes of Mallarme"s poetic treatment of the newspaper as a new landscape in Coup de tie's.2 The 'Oxen of the Sun' episode, which takes place at a lying-in hospital, brings together biological descriptions of the processes of gestation and birth, evolutionary history, the evolutionary theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and the philological and stylistic history of the English language. Technical processes of rhetoric and poetic are employed to probe the medicalization of birth and scientific self-reflection upon language itself. Through their use in the figurative construction by which a comic history of the stylistic development of language in English literature reflects a history of the development of the embryo and the birth process, these technical processes demonstrate how the nature of life itself is becoming technologized. This episode deals with the moment that the modern, techno-scientifically oriented Bloom and the classical, humanistically oriented Stephen meet. Their meeting leads to Bloom, with his modernistic, pragmatic practicality, rescuing Stephen in Nighttown, while Stephen's visionary self-reflexiveness provides Bloom with new modes of understanding himself and his life-world. The history of the composition of Ulysses confirms Joyce's techno-poetic theory, which regards the writer as co-producer with his consumers, acting as a literary, or perhaps more precisely, a poetic engineer. The process of the evolution of Ulysses — which has been well articulated by Groden, Herring, and Litz3 - incidentally illustrates how as the composition of Ulysses proceeds, Joyce progressively works

32

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

towards developing a techno-poetics. A quick comparison of the first six episodes with the subsequent episodes reveals the development of a more complex and multiplex language, style, and texture, culminating in the resplendent poetry of the 'Circe' (15th) and 'Ithaca' (17th) episodes. The different stages of revision of the 'Aeolus' episode (7th) certainly underline how important the relationship between cultural production, machines, and rhetorico-poetical composition is for the evolution of Joyce's final conception of his project.4 Re-draftings, which include his insertion of the 'headlines' or 'headers' into the text, exemplify this increased attention to the machinery of communication, to modes of popular culture and communication, and to other machinic motifs.5 Joyce's awareness of the importance of the everyday world engenders his elaborate exploration of techno-culture and communication in which his audience as consumer plays a role in producing the author as articulator (speaker and writer).6 In 1968 Henri Lefebvre, developing his concept of'la vie quotidienne,' begins his argument with a discussion of how Joyce's Ulysses presents 'everyday life ... transfigured by the words of man.'7 While Lefebvre in his work differentiates Joyce from French authors then being associated nearly fifty years after the publication of Ulysses with the 'new novel,' and while he also distinguishes the notion of the quotidien ('everyday life') current in the 1960s from that of the 1920s, he still identifies Joyce's Ulysses as the seminal work which introduced the concept of 'everyday life' into contemporary theoretical discourse. The nature of the changes that Joyce made to Ulysses as the process of its composition progressed strikingly reveal its close structural and conceptual relationship to Finnegans Wake. One aspect of the Wake is to provide an intertextual interpretation and clarification of his previous book, for Joyce's experience of the failure of contemporary writers and critics in understanding Ulysses significantly affected the way that he conceived of writing Finnegans Wake. There are at least two ways of looking at the problem of the genesis of Ulysses, which Groden, alluding to how Joyce dubbed the Wakes early draft 'Work in Progress,' calls 'Ulysses in Progress': first, to regard the stages of composition of Ulysses as a learning process in which Joyce discovering his dissatisfaction with the purely narrative structure of earlier stages of his writing (Dubliners, A Portrait] — develops strategies for a counter-narrative; second, to understand how the progressive stages of composition, while still constituting such a learning process, comprise Joyce's means for constructing a dense, multi-layered investigation of the newly emerging techno-culture. While Ulysses generally develops in keeping with its author s original conception, that conception appears to have been designed to permit the successive complications and complexity of a comprehensive, multiplex, and ambivalent vision of contemporary life in Dublin, a modern urban centre, which simultaneously provides its own thread(s) to encourage the reader to traverse this conceptual labyrinth.

Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer

33

If one were to view this process of composition as providing a pathway into the increasing complexity of Ulysses, those threads then lead the reader by stages away from the narrative movement of A Portrait (episodes 1 and 2), through levels of complex narrativity and interior monologue (episodes 3 to 6), into a new conception of a literary work as a poly-stylistic, semiotic machine designed for a world where verbal language is being displaced by a growing multiplicity of communication machines. In this latter version of the process of composition, the ongoing revisions of Ulysses (like those of Work in Progress) signify how in the composition of such a work everything is complicated, complex, perplex, and even, in the binary establishment of differences and the 'cunning' deceitfulness of fiction (i.e., duplicity), duplex.8 The new technological culture attracted Joyce's artistic interest since it was the ground for interrelating various aspects of the everyday world in which he lived: his politics (a restrained socialist-anarchism) , his social milieu, where the images of urbanization and internationalization fascinated him; his vision of a new Renaissance, with the artist as a modern Leonardo; his interest in the critique of psychoanalysis (that is, Freud's dream-work and libidinal machines, such as SacherMasoch's, which treat fantasy and desire as the work of mental engineering); and finally, the processes of mechanization and electrification, which appealed to the way that he found problems of technique to be central to poetic production. In the context of the contemporary world, his post-Nietzschean transformation of the Aristotelian conception of art as techne utilized techno-scientific processes, such as vivisection, microscopy, photolysis, and quantum mechanics. The very ground plans for Ulysses which Joyce provided for Carlo Linati, and in a later substantially different version for Stuart Gilbert, demonstrate the complex connections he worked out between various electro-mechanical, scientific, and technological processes, the organs of the body, and the multiplicity of styles and symbols that coexist in his book. This clearly reinforces the close connections between the design of his book and various electro-mechanical, scientific, and technological processes. Ulysses, consisting of a multitude of genres, is a poetic machine exhibiting a totally new mode of construction that provides a new means for presenting a vision of a pluralist anarchy within an ordered 'chaosmos' (/W118.21)10 - the fragmentation of everyday life in modern cities. The city as labyrinth is random, a virtual chaosmos that also has its particular mathematics, geometry, topology, and mechanics. Both the city as a form and the anatomy, biochemistry, and physiology of the body are appropriate interests for an artistengineer, linkages reflected in Leonardo's notebooks (to which, as noted previously, Joyce refers in his correspondence) as well as in Ulysses. According to both the Linati and Gilbert schemas, the art of mechanics - virtually a synonym in the early twentieth century for engineering - is the dominant art

34 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics of 'Wandering Rocks,' the tenth and pivotal episode of Ulysses. The presiding symbol of this episode is the Daedalian labyrinth, which establishes the artist as an engineer-artificer, for in early mythographic couplings of the poet with the constructor or producer, Daedalus, builder of the labyrinth, was described by mythographers as a great artificer. Francis Bacon records this aspect of the Daedalus myth in De Sapientia Veterum (1609; English translation, The Wisdom of the Ancients [1619]), where he associates the demi-god with the mechanic.11 Joyce's more recent source, Mallarmes Les Dieux antiques (1880), not only suggests that Daedalus's name means mechanic or artisan, but also associates this directly with Odysseus, to whom the epithetpalametis (an artisan or skilful deviser) is frequently applied.12 While Stephen's name ironically refers to him as an artist-artificer, our contemporary Ulysses — Leopold Bloom, who is truly Daedalian — is a media worker, a contriver, an applied scientist. As a kind of mechanic, Bloom (like Daedalus) is therefore described in the 'Ithaca' episode as a 'kinetic poet' who plays with mechano-poetic devices, which include anagrams and 'verbivocovisual' puns. 'Wandering Rocks' establishes the importance of the spatio-temporal shape of Dublin to the epic geography of Ulysses — investigated so thoroughly by Seidel1 — for a labyrinth constitutes a spatio-temporal artefact. 'To see Joyce at work on Wandering Rocks,' Frank Budgen observes, was to see an engineer at work with compass and slide-rule.'15 To design this episode, which highlights the interplay of relations of space and time in the wanderings of the citizens of Dublin, Joyce used maps of Dublin, street guides, tram timetables, stopwatches, and a mechanical game called 'Labyrinth.'16 In the Linati schema, Joyce lists the actors of'Wandering Rocks' as 'Objects, Places, Forces, Ulysses.' This reinforces Bloom-Ulysses as 'the vigilant wanderer' (T/14.1218), the contemporary equivalent of a nomad, who wanders throughout colonized Dublin. Like the Wake, Ulysses can certainly be described as a 'meandertale,' for Bloom's physical and mental meanderings, like Stephen's, inscribe the spaces of Dublin with significance. The abstract lines of movement over the surface of the city of Dublin striate and differentiate (i.e., vivisect) in a 'machinic' constructing, destructing, and reconstructing of the institutional technology of Dublin. The key episode in first engaging the reader's ongoing attention with the electromechanical and technological complexity of Ulysses and its social grounding in Dublin as a world is 'Aeolus.' As this episode opens, the consciously rhetorical style marked by elaborate figures and tropes is designed to explore the growing importance of electro-mechanical power and of commerce in Dublin life, from the trams that 'slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started,' to the 'grossbooted draymen [who] rolled barrels out of Prince's stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out

Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer

35

of Princes stores' (£77.21-4). A few lines later, a striking cluster of discrete associations of the mechanic and the organic (cited earlier) occurs when Leopold Bloom s meditation on the late Paddy Dignam, whose 'machineries are pegging away too' in his grave just like the printing presses, is immediately followed by the headline 'HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT' (t/7.84), referring to the social, economic, and mechanical processes by which the Freeman s Journal was produced. In this passage, to eat or be eaten by 'that old grey rat' (7.83), mechanization and atomization, the organic chemical machinery of fermentation and dissolution, and the productive machinery of the presses are ambivalently related to 'machines' that 'rule the world today' (7.81). In Ulysses these clusters of associations are as conceptually, rhetorically, and structurally complex (though not as polysemically complex) as in Finnegans Wake. A journalistic assemblage containing a medley of headlines reminiscent of those in Aeolus' occurs in the Wake when the 'quest' and resulting 'questions' and 'gestures' (i.e., 'questures') of a South African reporter delving into HCE's crimes result in a collage of headlines, a news story, photos, a radio broadcast, and film news: When visited by an indepondant reporter, 'Mike' Portland, to burrow burning the latterman's Resterant so is called the gortan in questure he mikes the fallowing for the Durban Gazette, firstcoming issue. From a collispendent. Any were. Deemsday. Bosse of Upper and Lower Byggotstrade, Ciwareke, may he live for river! The Games funeral at Valleytemple. Saturnights pomps, exhabiting that corricatore of a harss, revealled by Oscur Camerad. The last of Dutch Schulds, perhumps. Pipe in Dream Cluse. Uncovers Pub History. The Outrage, at Length. Affected Mob Follows in Religious Sullivence. Rinvention of vestiges by which they drugged the buddhy. Moviefigure on in scenic section. By Patathicus. And there, from out of the scuity, misty Londan, along the canavan route, that is with the years gone, mild beam of the wave his polar bearing, steerner among stars... (FW6Q2.16-30)

The everyday-world fascination with the assassination of Dutch Schultz and other amazing events - for example, Affected Mob follows in Religious Sullivence' or 'Rinvention of vestiges by which they drugged the buddhy' (dragged, drugged, the body, the buddy, the Buddha) - blends into an imaginary dream world in which there are references to the cinema and to the pre-cinematic camera obscura. Oscars, cameras, movie figures, and the Pathe news are interwoven with motifs of death and burial - doomsday, funeral games, pathos (Patathicus). In the background of this passage, the image of Saint Kevin ('What does Coemghen?' [602.9]) arises in a dream remembered from the everyday consciousness of HCE, a Chapelizod innkeeper, since that image presumably exists in the daytime world as part of the triptych in the chapel across the street from his inn. That stained-glass image, which is

36 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics compared to a 'moviefigure on in scenic section' (602.27), suggests how the culture of cathedrals and liturgies, which is here compared with film and interlarded in a series of journalistic headlines, might be regarded as a multimedia production of the medieval world. While 'mechanics' is identified as the art of 'Wandering Rocks,' machines, mechanism, and machinery are also predominant in 'Aeolus.' 'Aeolus,' which opens with a headline that semi-ironically proclaims, 'IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS,' is the first episode to present Dublin within the socio-political and economic context of a modern electrified, mechanized, and bureaucratized urban community by linking together the mechanics of commerce, transportation, communication, printing, and civic expression. In the last three categories, the technical aspects of rhetoric18 constitute a technology for producing expressive machines to manipulate language, gesture, and presentation, to persuade, exhort, or to assist in deliberation. From the outset, rhetoric as verbal assemblage is associated with machinic modes, whether through the mechanical fragmentation of the body in asyndeton and synecdoche — 'They watched the knees, legs, boots vanish. Neck' (t/7.63) — or through journalism and publishing in prosopopoeia and onomatopoeia - 'Silt. Almost human the way it silt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak' (£77.175—6). The contrapuntal interplay of the machinery of communication, trams, presses, and traffic with rhetorical products dramatically identifies rhetoric as a communicating machine. In Ulysses machines and objects communicate not only by being reproduced in the speech of the populace, but as embodied in the everyday social life of the people. The city as an electro-mechanical network, a labyrinth traversed by the Dublin United Tramway Company lines (£77.6-7), parallels the mechanically operated printing presses and their connection with electromechanical networks of communication. Communication, transportation, and other networks are tied together by timetables in a city all too conscious of time since, for a while after the adoption of Greenwich mean time as the standard time in 1891, Dublin had been guided by two standards of time: Greenwich mean time and local standard time or Dunsink time (25 minutes behind GMT; see f/8.109).19 This was the situation in Dublin when Bloom in the 'Ithaca' episode imagines the difference between the two times could be used to defraud bookmakers, if one had a private wireless telegraph which would transmit by dot and dash system the result of a national equine handicap (flat or steeplechase) of 1 or more miles and furlongs won by an outsider at odds of 50 to 1 at 3 hr. 8 m. p.m. at Ascot (Greenwich time), the message being received and available for betting purposes in Dublin at 2.59 p.m. (Dunsink time). (617.1674-8)

Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer

37

In Ulysses clocks cause moments of illumination, just as in Stephen Hero the ballast clock provides Stephen s archetypal example of the concept of epiphany. These moments reveal not only relationships between time and money and the paradoxes of colonial control of Dublin life, but also how time controls the geographical networks of space, and consequently communication in everyday life. In Ulysses Joyce is fully conscious of this new culture of time, space, and mechanization of the technological (or engineered) society— themes that were later examined by Joyce's friend Giedion, the Swiss art historian, who, besides Mechanization Takes Command (1948), also wrote another key book, Space, Time and Architecture (1941), one of the earliest to define this new culture. In it, Giedion noted that 'it is a temporal coincidence that Einstein should have begun his famous work Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper (1905) with a careful definition of simultaneity.' Giedion systematically pursues in art, architecture, and city planning the insight proposed in 1911 by Apollinaire, who was the first to point out theoretically that to the three dimensions recognized in the arts since the Renaissance, a fourth had to be added: time.20 In his writing, Joyce carried his treatment of space-time and simultaneity (or the relativistic multiplicity of points of view of an object or events) far beyond that of any earlier writers or visual artists. It is interesting to note that Joyce only uses the terms 'simultaneous' and 'simultaneously' (with one exception) from the fourteenth episode ('Oxen of the Sun') through the seventeenth. ('Ithaca'), with more than half (60 per cent) of those references occurring in the mathematical catechism of'Ithaca.' Frank Budgen, describing Joyce in the act of composing part of Ulysses with stop-watch, tram and rail-line timetables, and city maps, notes the significance of Joyce's analysis of social time in Ulysses: With the exception of Stephen, who is concerned with time as the medium in which his destiny unfolds and who hates past time because it would bind him with present duties, all the characters in Ulysses have just that social time sense that is part of the general social mentality of the period, and no more. This arises out of the necessity for coordinating their daily social movements. It is purely a technical thing, born of mechanical development. James Watt invented the steam engine, and the steam engine begat the locomotive, and the locomotive begat the time-table, forcing people to grapple with its complexities and think in minutes where their grandfathers had thought in hours. All their yesterdays, that in an earlier age would have been quietly buried in the hope of a glorious resurrection as myth, lie embalmed in the files of newspapers and snapshot albums. They have suffered the influence of the penny post, telegraph and telephone - all social institutions working to a close time-table. But the principle in forming that social time sense is the means of locomotion. The discoveries of the astronomer and mathematician have less immediate effect on this sense than the electrification of the suburban lines. Light and

38 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics heavenly bodies are doing what they always did, but the wheels of mechanical civilization are ever accelerating. 21

Social time is a question of control of speed, distance, direction, and force in relation to time, space, and forms. But Joyce carries the exploration of these factors further than Budgen's account suggests since all these elements of social time exist in reciprocity with one another and with society itself. Basically, when people use technologies (and hence encounter these factors of social time), they contribute to the social construction of these technologies as well as having their mind-set influenced by them. In Joyce's Anatomy of Culture, Cheryl Herr demonstrates how other processes of reciprocal social construction occur in selected areas of Dublin's life, such as publishing, censorship, and the press. Stephen, whose obsession with time causes part of his isolation from society, is the only major figure in Ulysses who stands outside this perspective. The rhythmic variations Joyce perceived between different moments of the day, which inhere in Bloom's movements throughout Dublin and to which the shifting rhythms of the text of Ulysses respond, make manifest the all-pervasive nature of social time as mediated through the technical, social, and natural machines22 within which people are entangled - some of the nets from which the youthful Stephen naively thought escape was possible. The social machine is part of the shaping of Bloom's psyche, for even his escape from the 'Citizen' in the 'Cyclops' episode is achieved through his Utopian belief in social engineering, which permits him, as Elijah Ben Bloom, to have a vision of a new Bloomusalem grounded in the new world of mechanization and technology. Not only do the mechanical and the technological, and their influence on the temporal, dominate the daily consciousness of the characters, they also provide the basis for the comic-satiric mode of shaping a contemporary comic epic poem through the construction of individual episodes (or chapters) which are uniquely styled modernist metamorphoses of miniature epics or epyllia.23 Joyce s writing, like Chaplin's films, shows an awareness that the comic vision of the contemporary world in which Bloom lives could best be realized through an awareness of the interrelation between the technological world of mechanization and those social and psychological machines that Deleuze and Guattari have identified. Throughout the day, Bloom s meditations often dwell on the subversion, transformation, or alternative uses of machinery and technology. In 'Circe' he declares that his imaginary Utopian vision for the transformation of Dublin life is to 'run a better tramline ... from the cattlemarket to the river. That's the music of the future. That's my programme' (U\5.1366-70). In 'Ithaca' he proposes inventions for 'an improved scheme of kindergarten' including

Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer 39 ... astronomical kaleidoscopes exhibiting the twelve constellations of the zodiac from Aries to Pisces, miniature mechanical orreries, arithmetical gelatine lozenges, geometrical to correspond with zoological biscuits, globemap playing balls, historically costumed dolls. (£717.572-5)

Clearly, the social machine plays a significant part in molding Bloom's psyche, just as Bloom's living in Ireland contributes minutely to altering that society. The social role of machines and technology in Ulysses is complex, comprehensive, and ambivalent, for Bloom, a socialist-anarchist (like Joyce himself), can in counterpoint with his utopianism envision the negative aspects of the mechanized world: Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Labour saving apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour. (£715.1391—4)

Bloom realizes that Dublin politics often involve an 'infernal machine with a time fuse' (£715.1199), while its inhabitants erroneously embrace such myths as: 'A nun ... invented barbed wire' (t/8.154). Thinking of the plaster cast of Juno and Venus in front of the National Library, Bloom uses technological analogies to contrast the feasting of Olympian gods with that of ordinary people: Put you in your proper place. Quaffing nectar at mess with gods golden dishes, all ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled mutton, carrots and turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar imagine it drinking electricity: gods' food. Lovely forms of women sculped Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. (£78.925-30)

By describing the 'nectar' of erotic encounter as 'drinking electricity,' and describing people ingesting, digesting, and excreting 'like stoking an engine' (electricity vs. fossil fuels or wood), Joyce counterpoints two complementary ways of viewing bodily processes as technological processes. He also adds to those processes the mechano-chemical when he describes the processes of mastication, digestion, and excretion. Then, in 'Ithaca,' the sexual act is described in terms of an internal combustion engine: Envy? Of a bodily and mental male organism specially adapted for the superincumbent posture

40

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

of energetic human copulation and energetic piston and cylinder movement necessary for the complete satisfaction ... (t/17.2156-9) Communication technology, machines, and machine-like processes of old and new forms of everyday culture pervade the action that takes place on 16 June and the early morning of the 17th. They include among many others: telephone, telegraph, wireless, photography, printing, phonography, electric lighting, brewing, slaughtering, manufacturing, navigating, advertising, journalism, tupenny mags, cartoons, sermons, concerts, and music halls. Joyce is producing the counter-epic of the new culture of time and space — those changed and changing relationships between space, time, speed, distance, control, and electro-mechanics - that emerged during the first decades of the twentieth century. Wyndham Lewis's critique, 'The Art of James Joyce' (1927) (to be discussed in detail later), which is most sensitive to the challenges of this new era, associates Joyce's works with this new culture of time and space as exemplified in Bergson's time-philosophy and Einstein's theory of relativity. Joyce's reply to Lewis in Work in Progress was to transform Lewis into a pedantic, academic analyst. His comic apologia to Harriet Shaw Weaver in which he asserts that he is the 'greatest engineer' was also probably sparked off in part by Lewis's critique. Shem (in his persona as Nick, a devil in the game of angels and devils) is described in 'The Mime of the Mick, Nick and the Maggies' as 'he, being brung up on soul butter, have recourse of course to poetry. With tears for his coronaichon such as engines weep' (FW23Q.23-4). Further examination of the extended portrait of Shem (1.7) depicts a mechanic or assembler. To return to the parodic Rabelaisian catalogue cited in the previous chapter, the stuff that Shem uses in his assemblages are 'persianly literatured' over the floor and walls of his lair and include linguistic and literary items such as: ... burst loveletters, telltale stories ... alphybetty formed verbiage, vivlical viasses ... fluefoul smut... curried notes, upset latten tintacks ... once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations, limerick damns ... blasphematory spits, stale shestnuts ... tress clippings from right, lift and cintrum ... highbrow lotions, kisses from the antipodes ... undeleted glete ... war moans ... (183.11-184.1) Different genres of popular expression mentioned in this catalogue range from the Bible (Vivlical viasses') to pornography ('fluefoul smut'),24 and from romances ('burst loveletters') to newspaper articles ('tress clippings'). The stuff of Joycean poetic - the phrases and objects he machinically assembles in constructing the Wake — ranges from 'highbrow lotions [to] kisses from the antipodes'; from elite culture to low, just as from the heights of the body - the head and

Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer 41 eyes - to the lower parts, the farting arse. This medley of forms of everyday expression are intermingled with a multitude of other everyday techno-cultural objects, including such clothing as 'reversible jackets ... vestas which had served ... borrowed brogues ... crooked straight waistcoats'; foods like 'amygdaloid almonds' or 'cans of Swiss condensed bilk'; and even a wide variety of garters from all sorts of ladies ranging from schoolgirls to grandmothers, 'super whores' to vice-abbesses, and washerwomen to merry widows. Shem, the 'doctator' (172.22; dictator + doctor), pursuing the technology of knowledge as a 'sham' and a shamus, explores the entire social spectrum diachronically and synchronically, so that intermingled with relatively obscure theological heresies ('Jansens Chrest' or 'Albiogenselman' [173.12, 173.13]), or famous historical literary works ('Shakhisbeard' [177.32], 'gullibles travels,' 'low cornaille existence,' 'greet scoot, duckings and thuggery' [177.35], 'always bottom sawyer' [Dickens and Mark Twain]),25 there are riddles ('when is a man not a man? [170.5]), ads ('abortisements' [172.5ff, 181.27-33]) and wireless cables ('Anzi, cabled ... from his Nearapoblican asylum to his Jonathan for a brother: Here tokay, gone tomory, we're spluched, do something, Fireless' [172.22-6]). When Shem 'scrabbled and scratched and scriobbled and skrevened nameless shamelessness about everybody ever he met' (182.13—14), since he 'was in bardic memory low,' he had to use as his material 'every crumb of trektalk, covetous of his neighbour's word' (172.29), as well as 'delicate tippits ... thrown out to him touching his evil courses by some wellwishers' (172.31—2). Joyce, who argued that his audience was those who produced his work for him, collected bits and pieces of chance conversations, which he overheard or in which he participated, as well as making constant notes on observations or events which occurred during his everyday meanderings. Shem's poetic method is similar to Joyce's own methods of collecting and assembling bits of material. Furthermore, in a passage which is a metacommentary on Ulysses, and which associates Shem with Joyce, Shem is described in the act of 'making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles, Edition de ttntbres and gloating over how each of the bits that are represented by 'every splurge on the vellum' is ... an aisling vision more gorgeous than the one before t.i.t.s., a roseschelle cottage by the sea for nothing for ever, a ladies tryon hosiery raffle at liberty, a sewerful of guineagold wine with brancomongepadenopie and sick cylinder oysters worth a billion a bite, an entire operahouse (there was to be stamping room only in the prompter's box and everthemore his queque kept swelling) of enthusiastic noble-women flinging every coronetcrimsoned stitch they had off at his probscenium, one after the others, inamagoaded into ajustilloosing themselves, in their gaiety pantheomime ... (179.31-180.4) Shem, as Daedalian, a producer of poetic machines, is Vico's ingenious artificer, 26

42

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

for 'arty, reminiscensitive' Shem, who 'reparteed with a selfevitant subtlety' (186.33), is the self-reflexive modern meta-poet, 'writing the mystery of himsel in furniture' (184.9-10). This brief comic meta-commentary on Ulysses ('his usylessly unreadable') makes it simultaneously pornography, that is, a 'blue book' ('blue' as slang for obscene, as well as referring to the fact that the cover of the first edition of Ulysses was blue); a missal, that is, a 'book of Eccles'; a book of the dark, namely, an Edition de te"nebres; and a dream book, or an 'aisling vision' assembled together in a book that encompasses, among other genres, pastoral romance, burlesque, festivity, opera, striptease, pantomime and ritual - a combination which appears to be in keeping with Lowry's description quoted in chapter 1 of the modernist work as a complex mixture of many modes and a sort of machine. Imagine Joyce composing Ulysses around 1920, and again while working on Work in Progress around 1930, asking the question What is the role of the book in a culture which has discovered photography, phonography, radio, film, television, telegraph, cable, and telephone and has developed newspapers, magazines, advertising, Hollywood, and sales promotion? Film, transforming narrative description into dramatic presentation, will provide much of the panorama of novels; the stories and data of everyday life will appear in greater detail and more up-to-date fashion in the press, on radio, and in film; oral poetry and speech will be reanimated by the potentialities of sound recording. Joyce's consciousness of everyday culture is evident through his inclusion of forms such as crosswords, riddles, and logical puzzles, and genres such as comics, movies, sports events, and radio broadcasts, to help make the Wake the poetry of everybody. Umberto Eco has shown how intricately Joyce could integrate a popular cultural form such as comic strips like Mandrake the Magician and Felix the Cat into the 'meandertale' of the Wake.21 In such a context there would be a strong tendency to construct the literary work as one of a number of possible semiotic, communicating machines by placing a priority on act and gesture. Therefore, it is not surprising that Shaun attributes to Shem the declaration: 'In the beginning there was the gest' (468.5). Besides associating the word' with jest, Joyce intrinsically relates writing to a conception of gesture as the universal language - including speech as well as writing - which becomes the ultimate foundation for the genesis of communication, for as Stephen observes in the 'Circe' episode: 'So that gesture, not music not odour, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm' (U\5.105-7).28 Gesture is the foundation of mnemonic in the classical and esoteric memory theatres.29 It is a language inscribed by and in the senses and sensitivity of all bodies human, animal, or non-organic. Such a mnemonic related to a gestural (kinaesthetic) language generates lines of striation and differentiation in space-time which through their effects machinically

Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer

43

produce significance, so that the Joycean intellectual imagination is grounded in the memory, which is itself physically and dynamically grounded in the body and its electro-mechanics and electro-chemistry. Even objects and machines seem to have their gestures. We have seen Bloom reflecting on how the printing press appears to be speaking 'in its own way' (U7.174-5). Gesture is a fundamental aspect of Joyce's theory of comunication for he regards gesture as prehistoric writing. It is also the foundation of rhetorical communication, whether delivered orally or through the medium of hieroglyphics, or phonetic writing and print as technologies. In Ulysses when Stephen Dedalus engages in dialectical argumentation with former friends whom he now views as hostile critics, he muses satirically about the significance of his name and his role as a fabulous artificer. These motifs are carried over from A Portrait into Ulysses, where Stephen develops a theory of communicative action which subsumes verbal action within its scope: Lapwing. Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone. Him, then Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They mock to try you. Act. Be acted on. Lapwing. I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink. (£79.976-81)

'Lapwing' alludes to the Metamorphoses (8.236—8 and 8.252—9), where Ovid suggests that the lapwing which sang as Daedalus buried his son, Icarus, was Daedalus's own nephew whom he had murdered out of envy, since he believed the nephew would become a greater inventor than he was. Through this Ovidian echo, Stephen, who will pursue a satiric and cynical, dynamic poetic of action, identifies himself as a potentially greater artificer or mechanic than Daedalus.30 Other products and processes of mechanics and engineering are secondary to exploring communication itself as machinic, as a semiotic assemblage. In the first episode of Ulysses ('Telemachus'), Stephen compares the writer's pen to the surgeon's knife31 when he notes that Buck Mulligan 'fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The cold steel pen' (t/1.152). In a Pateresque fashion,32 Stephen links the poetic with the technics of weaving, but then moves beyond that and links the weaving process with the electrical, chemical, and mechanical metamorphoses of the body: 'As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies ... from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image' (t/9.376—8). The relation of the productive mechanics of weaving to memory is also established for 'in the future, the sister of the past, I see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which I shall be' (t/9.383-5). Memory, time, and the poetic are entwined within the material encounter of the embodied person and the material world.

44 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics As Stephen thinks of neo-Platonizing esoteric occultists, such as George Russell, he observes (evoking the Bergsonian duree), 'Streams of tendency and eons they worship'; so he steels himself to 'hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past' ([79.88-9). But this is a here and now which exists only in and through memory: Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound. Buzz. Buzz. But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms. (£79.205-9)

This Bergsonian concept of memory as virtual coexistence, which becomes the groundwork of socio-cultural production in Ulysses, is that of a techno-mnemonic machine in which the here-and-now reality only exists in the past, producing the future: 'I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then morrow as now was be past yester' ([715.2408-9). While anti-mechanistic, Bergson's dynamic memory, which is interested in movement not things, and thus involves machinic activity and requires what he calls a 'motor ally,' is an interpretation machine. Joycean memory is constructive, describable in a machine-like terminology of biochemical transformation, mirror optics, and bodily movement. Characteristically, Mulligan, who is described mechanistically as Ireland's 'bonesetter, her medicineman' ([71.419), devalues memory by disingenuously alleging that he has an impaired memory: 'What? Where? I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations' ([71.192-3). But it is Bloom's strength that his tactile, multi-sensory, polymorphousness puts him in touch with the reality of the past through remembering. His memory is activated by being 'tipped' (to use the language of the Wake as well as Ulysses] with a tactile trigger. For example, in 'Lestrygonians' (episode 8), Bloom tastes wine: 'Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered' ([78.898-9); or again in the Ormond bar (episode 11), he and Ritchie experience the music, 'dulcimers touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their each his remembered lives' ([711.676-7). Music, as a perceptual stimulant, massages the sensoria and thence the desiring machine through the machinery of the body. Perception as a function of the machinery of the body is itself mechano-organic: 'The sea they think they hear. Singing. A roar. The blood it is. Souse in the ear sometimes. Well, it's a sea. Corpuscle islands' ([711.945). Joyce explains such effects in his writing when he tells Budgen that in contrast to Fletcher's Purple Island (1633), his language reproduces mechano-organic functions: 'The words I write are adapted to express first one of

Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer

45

its [the body's] functions then another. In Lestrygonians (episode 8) the stomach dominates and the rhythm of the episode is that of the peristaltic movement.'3 The fabricator of Ulysses world, Dublin, is not only aware of the machinic nature of memory rooted in the material world, but is also conscious of the increasingly important nature of the new communicating machines in the mnemonic process itself. In an interchange described at one point in 'Ithaca' (episode 17) between Bloom and Stephen in which they compare the Hebrew and Irish languages phonetically and 'glyphically' (17.725-76), the catechetical style which describes their dialogue reviews scientifically the evolutionary process of communication within which the technology of writing comes to be increasingly simplified and becomes a machinic precursor of contemporary communication technologies: In what common study did their mutual reflections merge? The increasing simplification traceable from the Egyptian epigraphic hieroglyphs to the Greek and Roman alphabets and the anticipation of modern stenography and telegraphic code in the cuneiform inscriptions (Semitic) and the virgular quinquecostate ogham writing (Celtic). (£717.769-74)

The continuity from script to print to the digital is directly linked to mnemonic machines. Recent audio-visual technology complements this, for towards the conclusion of 'Hades' (episode 6), Bloom muses about postmortem reproduction of sight, sound, voice, and memory and its potential relationship with telephones, phonographs, and photography: Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on Sunday. Put on old greatgrandfather. Krahaak! Hellohellohello amawfullygladaseeagain hellohello amawf krpthsthh. Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds of the face. (£76.962-9)

Ulysses explores the relationship of the communicative, the poetic, and the machinic by its penetrating, encyclopaedic exploration of a cosmic machine. Here, as in the Wake, Joyce comprehensively contemplates the human body, other bodies, and their physical and intersubjective interaction in the social machine of city life. Each of the eighteen episodes grounds the action of Ulysses in the nature of the body as an organo-chemico-electro-mechanical entity. As the action of Ulysses unfolds, each episode inscribes machinically a momentary structure on the raw landscape of Dublin as a 'body without organs' (Artaud, Deleuze, and Guattari), which generates the ever-changing, chaotic lineaments of this society. This

46

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

dynamic structure, outlined in the schemas of Ulysses that Joyce provided for some of his associates to assist them in interpreting it,35 is directly related to the human body and its organs: the movement of the citizens through the 'Wandering Rocks' episode is a blood stream; the communication machinery of Dublin presented in the 'Aeolus' episode is the lungs; the gestural night-world of the 'Circe' episode in Dublin's Nighttown or red-light district is the loco-motor (or neuro-motor) system; the mnemonic machinery of the 'Eumaeus' episode, the nerves; the dialectical machine of the 'Scylla and Charybdis' episode, which takes place in the National Library, the brain; the analytic review of Stephen's and Bloom's day and their lifeworlds in the penultimate 'Ithaca' episode, the skeleton, and so forth. The city becomes an electro-mechanical body, a reproduction of its citizenry. This grounding in the body is even more exhaustively developed in the Wake, where HCE and ALP, as blood stream and nervous system, constitute one androgynous body, that of the dreamer. This 'chaosmic' aspect of Ulysses emerges from the associated astronomicalcosmological machinery within which the characters as subject-objects move. So the concluding episode of Ulysses, which Joyce said was 'pre-human and posthuman,' presents Molly as Penelope weaving a web of sense which is related to the globe, although a rather unpredictable and nomadic globe, moving through the solar system and its galaxy. Joyce notes that Molly's 'monologue turns slowly, evenly, though with variations, capriciously, but surely like the huge earthball itself round and round spinning,'36 complementing how, in the penultimate 'Ithaca' episode, 'Bloom and Stephen ... become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze.'37 Midway through the 'Oxen of the Sun' episode, complex allusions relate the astro-mechanics of the cosmos to the text as a poetic machine and to the unfolding dramatic action of labour and birth by an allusion to the appearance in the sky of the constellation Pegasus at 11:00 p.m.: 'the equine portent grows again, magnified in the deserted heavens, nay to heaven's own magnitude, till it looms, vast, over the house of Virgo' (U\ 4.1097-9). Through this poetic alllusion and its subsequent tranformations, Martha, Millicent, and Molly all become metamorphoses of Virgo, the virgin, 'wonder of metempsychosis.' In an anticipation of the concluding 'Penelope' monologue, Venus, the daystar on 17 June, rises - 'the everlasting bride, harbinger of the daystar. The bride ever virgin' — and seems to blend with the constellation Taurus, for 'it [Aldeberan, Alpha Tauri, in the constellation Taurus] floats, it flows about the starborn flesh and loose it streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents of the cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling, writhing in the skies a mysterious writing' (C/14.1104-7).38 The inscription of moving objects in the skies reflects the inscription of the physical and mental movements of the characters of Ulysses, contributing to the randomizing, serendip-

Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer

47

itous poetics of the Joycean 'chaosmos.' As Bloom, Stephen, and Molly float, flow, wind, coil, swirl, and writhe through their everyday world, their movements and metamorphoses also produce a 'mysterious writing.' These aspects of galactic mechanics (astronomy) are further highlighted and developed in the 'Ithaca' episode. In the current context, what begins with the poetic returns to the poetic, for 'after a myriad of metamorphoses of symbol it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangle sign upon the forehead of Taurus' (U\ 4.1107-9). Virgo by visual illusion becomes Aldeberan Alpha Tauri of the constellation Taurus the Bull, astrologically associated with dominant influences of poetry, love, and money. In this presage of ALP, the female characters become the sign of beginning and, as Anna is, the source of the poetic. From Aeolus' to 'Ithaca' there is an increasing urgency to highlight communication machinery, everyday culture, and mechanization taking command, while relating them to the role of the book itself as a communicating machine. Aeolus,' where this stress first comes to the fore, and 'Ithaca,' the penultimate, closing episode, are noteworthy in the combination of these emphases. (The 'Ithaca' episode can be described as the conclusion of Bloom's day because 'Penelope,' which, as Joyce suggested, has neither beginning, middle, nor end, is an entity unto itself as well as an epilogue and monologue.) Joyce lovingly called 'Ithaca,' which in many ways is the key to Ulysses, 'the ugly duckling of the book, and once described it as 'a mathematico-astronomico-physico-mechanico-geometrico-chemico sublimation of Bloom and Stephen ... to prepare for the final amplitudinously curvilinear episode Penelope,' where all events are resolved into their cosmic, physical, psychical, etc., equivalents, e.g., Bloom jumping down the area, drawing water from the tap, the micturating in the garden, the cone of incense, lighted candle and statue so that not only will the reader know everything and know it in the baldest coldest way, but Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze.41

In developing this episode, Joyce read and used Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy?2 which will be examined in greater detail in chapter 10, which deals with Joycean mathematics. In the apocalyptic hallucination of 'Circe,' apocalypse becomes a revelation of chaos presided over by a mechanized comic strip Hobgoblin with receding forehead and Ally Sloper nose'43 who announces itself as 'C'est moi! L'homme qui rit! L'homme primigene!' (£715.2159-60). Juggling tiny planets rotating like roulette wheels and announcing a kind of chaosmic roulette game, the sudden disappearance of this laughing, primordial harlequin 'spring [ing] off into vacuum' leads Florry (one of the prostitutes in Bella Cohen's brothel), 'crossing herself secretly,' to

48

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

declare, 'The end of the world!' as la female tepid effluvium leaks out from her. Nebulous obscurity occupies space (£715.2165-8). These particles are both gaseous and electrifying, with the electric voice of a gramophone rising from the mists playing the strains of 'The Holy City,' while 'a rocket rushes up the sky and bursts. A white star falls from it, proclaiming the consummation of all things and second coming of Elijah' (£715.2174-5). These techno-mechanical events complement Elijah's harangue with its allusions to telephones and railroads: 'Say, I am operating this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God's time is 12:25 ... book through to eternity junction, the non-stop run' (£715.2190-5). This Elijah is a Coney Island barker, a figure from everyday culture, who in cliche'd aphorisms can query, 'Are you a god or a doggone clod?' (£715.2195); and, 'Have we got cold feet about the cosmos?' (£715.2197). This is an Elijah whose coming has been announced by a Hobgoblin Paraclete laughing-machine: Wyndham Lewis's wild body. While the 'Circe' episode, as the climax of Ulysses, reminds us of the mechanics of the Freudian dream work, the book's conclusion, which counterpoints the almost science-fiction-like mathematical catechism of 'Ithaca' and the intense desiring machine produced by Mollys closing soliloquy, is the only possible resolution, for the conjunction of the final and the penultimate episodes - 'Penelope' and 'Ithaca' - shows that only through the machinery of memory can communication as communion occur: that is, a secularized, collective, bodily communion achieved through a remembrance of the partial objects produced by the Ithacan mechanics of bodily perception breaking apart the Penelopean life flow and of their reassemblage through the ensuing resonances shared by Molly and Bloom. Since 'Penelope' complements as well as supplements the 'Ithacan' portraits of Bloom and Stephen, as well as the dramatic action of the previous episodes, Molly's monologue, like the catechism of 'Ithaca' and the book's reader-consumer who reproduces Ulysses in the act of reading, moves transversely across the surface of the unfolding action of Ulysses. Joyce's use of science and mathematics, like Bloom's, is that of an engineer, applied (£717.56l-8),45 while Bloom and Stephen 'individually represent' the contrasting temperaments of The scientific. The artistic' (£717.559-60). As Ulysses unfolds, both within the process of the sequential reading of the book itself and within the time period (about seven years) of the genetic process of writing the book, the text comes increasingly to insist that its consumer who is also its producer must approach it as a poetic machine. The mathematical catechism of 'Ithaca' underlines this principle again and again, insisting on the transition from the static poetry of a traditionalist Stephen — the poet as a young man - to acceptance of the kinetic poetry, associated with Leopold Bloom, for within that development resides the poetry intrinsic to everyday culture and its deep commitment to the incitement of desire or loathing. In the language ofFinnegans Wake, through

Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer

49

the Joycean 'precedent decomposition' (614.34) (machinic deconstruction) into the 'dialytically separated elements' (614.33) of the epic with its narrative orientation, a 'subsequent recombination' (614.36) (reconstruction) produces a satiric black drama with its machinic dynamics involving the cosmos, the globe, a universe of particular objects, everyday life, and everybody living within it.

4 Singing the Electro-Mechano-Chemical Body

Joyces interest in the technical surface and the machinic provides him with a natural route to wit, humour, and the comic since encounters between the machine-like and organic life frequently dramatize discontinuities in the flow of life. In the Wake the stuttering of HCE, who sees himself in the dream as a series of machines, breaks up the life flow of ALP, as the stone causes the flow of a river to change course. Joyce s 'comeday' of letters, Finnegans Wake, plays over the surfaces of everyday life, just as Blooms peregrinations through the city of Dublin do in Ulysses. The creation of discrete temporal moments within the text resulting from such dislocations produces comic effects which draw attention to the ongoing flow of the words by inhibiting it or drastically changing or controlling its rhythm. Such a propensity to use the surface of things to provide comic perspective would be considered by many characteristically Celtic - the type of strategies associated with John Joyce's tale-telling. This Celtic sense of humour attracted Joyce to Lewis Carroll and Francois Rabelais as well as to the great tradition of neoclassical comic writers and satirists: Ben Jonson, Pope, Sterne, and especially the Irish Dean, Jonathan Swift.1 A phrase from the 'Feenichts Playhouse,' the children's microdrama, describes the satiric thrust of drama of the Wake in the mechanical terms of a ship moving through the sea: 'your wildeshaweshowe moves swiftly sterneward!' (FW256.13). Ongoing play with the names of Sterne and Swift continues to emphasize the affinity of the comic and satiric with the machinic, such as 'a stern poise for a swift pounce' (282.7) or, using Swifts title as Dean: 'Have you ever thought of a hitching your stern and being ourdeaned' (291.F4). More complex machinery is invoked in a description of one of Jaunty Jaun's moments of laughter: 'swifter as mercury he wheels right round starnly on the Rizzies suddenly, with his gimlets blazing rather sternish (how black like thunder!), to see what's loose' (454.20-3). Joyce's comic technique in the Wake frequently has a mathematician's precision,

Singing the Electro-Mechano-Chemical Body

51

not unlike that of Lewis Carroll - a technique that is foreshadowed in the way comedy, humour, and a parodic mathematical precision coalesce in the mathematical catechism of 'Ithaca' in Ulysses. In his Alice books and other major nonsense writing,2 Lewis Carroll discovered the key to a wit of the surfaces in which words 'can become like a shunting point and we go from one to the other by a multitude of routes; from which the idea of a book emerges that does not simply tell a history, but an ocean of histories.'3 These portmanteau words and complex puns and their utilization in a pseudo-logical structure create in Carroll's writings what Deleuze has described as a schizoid-like artistic language. This language is central to Joyce's mechanics of sense and to his comic-anarchic modes of writing. Here is a vision which parallels that of the world of Duchamp, Dada, and cubism for it embraces both the complexities of sense and the potential for absurd emptiness of the growing technological world. Awareness of machinery, science, and technology as aspects of the everyday world of contemporary humankind abounds in Finnegans Wake. All sorts of processes and machines play a role in the 'retelling' of the Wake, although those having to do with everyday communication occupy a primary place. The new world of communication technology, the new modes of popular culture, and electrified mechanization held a particular attraction for an author reconstructing the night of an 'Everybody' (HCE), for the dream action which takes place that night also retraces the history of technology and the development of society: 'First you were Nomad, next you were Namar, now you're Numah and it's soon you'll be Nomon' (374.22). The history of'the people' making themselves unfolds first as early wanderers ('Nomad'), then as warriors ('Namar'), next as the lonely alienated one ('Numah'), and soon transcends the limits of the human, like a hero, the cunning Odysseus ('Nomon'). This complex pun and palindrome involves elements such as nomos + gnomon + noman (i.e., law and custom) + one who interprets or knows + no man + know man + Ulysses' name = no one. Joyce's sense that the future is always already present in the past leads to the simultaneous history of the Wake, where the simultaneity is achieved through the interplay of present technologies, which are already past, with historic technologies, in which that nature already adhered. A key episode revealing the historian (analyst-annalist) at work - the 'Mamalujo-Tristan and Isolde' episode (II.4), which traces the movement of the waves of memory through the labyrinth of the senses — is immediately preceded by HCE's metamorphosis into His Most Exuberant Majesty King Roderick O'Conor, the 'last pre-electric king of Ireland.' In 1922 Joyce began Work in Progress by composing an early draft of this passage. As 'the paramount chief polemarch,' Roderick gives a 'socalled last supper' in his 'umbrageous house of the hundred bottles with the radio beamer tower and its hangars, chimbneys and equilines' (380.12-17). The 'postelectric' king, HCE, who merges

52 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics or blends with King Roderick, is or has a radio beamer, which thus plays a role in the section on legendary history that follows. The scene concludes when HCE, imagining himself as the last High King, drunkenly collapses. His house becomes a ship, the Nansy Hans, sailing to Netherland and dreamland ('Nattenlaender'); but it also becomes the centerpiece of the subsequent episode (II.4), which is a medley of two other, but slightly later, early fragments of what was to become the Wake. The first is the 'Mamalujo' vignette with the four old men, the four historians (annalists) or inquisitors (psychoanalysts); the second is 'Tristan and Isolde.' While the tale in the resulting episode is primarily told by the four old men, who are conceived as waves lapping against the boat, or gulls flying abroad and telling what is happening in the boat between the lovers, the old men are simultaneously part of'the new world presses' (387.36) and their electric media - broadcasters or singers - for 'now croons the yunk [Yankee]' (388.1). Through his reference to Herzian waves and electromagnetism, Joyce indicates that the older methods of transmitting news and rumour - by boat across the ocean's waves or within limited areas by voice (sound waves) — have been supplemented; broadcast news as well as telephony are mentioned: 'Like the newscasters in their old plyable of^4 Royenne Devours (388.7; a playbill of A Royal Divorce) and 'Jazzaphoney' (388.8; Napoleons Josephine + jazz + telephone).5 For the rumours and tales also transmit 'as difinely developed in time by psadatepholomy, the past and present (Johnny MacDougall speaking, give me trunks, miss!) and present and absent and past and present and perfect...' (389.16-19). In fact, as the Hollywoodesque aspects of II.4 might suggest, the four old men are people 'of whom great things were expected in the fulmfilming department' (398.25). In the post-electric world of Roderick, rumour, story, and history all become technologically mediated. Joyce, like Walt Whitman, but about seventy-five years later, is announcing the coming of a new era that is marked by the discovery of an 'electric body.'6 Writing with greater certainty and attention to detail, Joyce envisions this era as an electric age produced by mechanics, physics, and chemistry, motifs associated with the nature of such a 'deeply sangnificant' (357.15; blood + song + significant) night book as the Wake, which is so complexly associated with the human body itself. While discussing a possibility of the corpse's being brought back to life in the flesh, the dream discourse declares: 'To proceed. We might leave that nitrience of oxagiants to take its free of the air and just analectralyse that very chymerical combination, the gasbag where the warderworks' (67.7). A truly remarkable electrochemical machine! The 'tolling' of his tale about an incident in Phoenix Park, in which HCE spies on two girls, declares, 'Imagine twee cweamy wosen' (Ger., wosen = roses = girls = two roses, or is it three?). Next follows, 'Then inmaggin a stotterer,' for HCE is a

Singing the Electro-Mechano-Chemical Body

53

stutterer. Since three soldiers spy on HCE spying on the two girls, this is a process where next we 'immengin up to three longly lurking lobstarts,' for the imagination is an engine producing images of and for a 'stotterer' who is 'one biggermaster Omnibil,' a super-automobile or an omnibus (337.16, 18—19, 20) — a machine trying to get started. HCE is also associated with a mole, since Joyce described the composition - the telling of the tale - of the Wake as burrowing and tunnelling. The mole as a burrowing or tunnelling animal reproduces the effect of a machine. ('Mole' is associated with machines, etc., at 76.33, 271.41, 310.1, 353.25, 474.22, and 576.25.)7 Even when we 'inmaggin,' it is a machinic process, since the 'maggies' (maggots) are associated with the burrowing gangs in the Wake: the beetles, scarabs, earwigs, moles, and others. According to Caresse Crosby, Joyce had insisted that the Wakes structure is mathematical.8 This is certainly consistent for a book whose beginning pages include a discussion of 'caligulat[ing] by multiplicables the alltitude and malltitude' (4.32). In the schoolroom, or the 'Triv and Quad,' episode (II.2), the children learn geometry, algebra, combinations, permutations, and probabilities, activities which receive equal emphasis with language, humour, and the arts of the trivium (grammar, dialectic [logic], and rhetoric). Joyce approaches language as a mathematical structure and as an engineering problem. At the very simplest level of playing with the phonological material, he employs the science of historical phonetics in designing many of his overlayerings and chainings of linguistic units. Bishop has shown the common derivation of the conceptually distinct terms 'phonetics,' 'phenomenon,' and 'phantasm' in an etymological chart illustrating how the proto-Indo-European root *bha- (to render luminous, to bring to light, to enlighten) produces the 'funantics' (450.27) of'phonemanon' (258.22).9 Both phonology and phonemics provided Joyce with ways of seeing language as an assemblage, both synchronically and diachronically. The prosodic sound-sense ratio in poetry which had traditionally been spoken of as numbers - 'I lisp'd in numbers' (Pope) - is treated by Joyce in interplay with arithmetic in such examples as 'zeroic couplet.' But, then, that phrase appears in a passage which also involves references to communication, electricity, mathematics, surveying, and geography (all associated with engineering). Furthermore, there are also references to voiceless phones, irrational numbers, and deafness (i.e., both of these latter references are implied in the 'surd' in the following passage):10 A Tullagrove pole to the Height of County Fearmanagh has a septain inclinaison and the graphplot for all the functions in Lower County Monachan, whereat samething is rivisible by nighttim, may be invoked into the zeroic couplet, palls pell inhis heventh glike noughty times oo, find, if you are not literally cooefficient, how minney combinaisies and permutandies can be played on the international surd! (284.5-14)

54 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics Associations between telecommunications and language abound along with associations of poets with mechanics. Reference, for example, is made to Roof Seckesign van der Deckel (a Shem-like figure), a 'gendarm auxiliar,' an 'arianautic sappertillery' (530.18), who is 'relying on his morse-erse wordybook' (530.19). Echoes from a network of allusions to policing, infantry, artillery, air, land, sea (the military machinery - army, navy, and air force),11 opera, Morse code, language, and excrement are woven together, for this is a world of chaotic semiotic codes where the 'seckesign's' (seek-a-signs) intermingle multiplicities of signs. A machine can be considered to be a clustered "proximity" between independent terms (topological proximity is itself independent of distance or contiguity)'12 and for that matter, therefore, an engineering principle particularly adapted to the crafting of a semiotic system which is 'nat language in any sinse of the world' (83.12). Since complex communication technology is characteristic of the later stages of electro-mechanization, cinema, radio, newspapers, tupenny magazines, comics (contemporary cave drawing), and telecommunications materialize again and again throughout the night of the Wake. The 'tele-' prefix appears in: 'teleframe,' 'telekinesis,' 'telemac,' 'telepath,' 'telephone,' 'telephony,' 'telescope,' 'telesmell,' 'telesphorously/ 'televisible,' 'television,' 'televox,' and 'telewisher' as well as in a variety of'messes of mottage' such as Velivision' and 'dullaphone.' The Wake refers or alludes to a wide variety of processes associated with communication such as photochemistry ('any photoist worth his chemicots' [111.27]), printing, electrolysis ('helixtrolysis' [163.31]), waves, electronic scanning ('the bairdboard bombardment screen' in the 'charge of a light barricade' [349.9,11]), and electromagnetism. In addition to machines and processes involved with communications there are all sorts of 'giddy gadgets' (597.9) and other machinery that surface at one point or another during the dream action. Yet the starting point for an understanding of the role that machines play in the Wake and of the relationship between the machinery of dream and this nightworld is to be discovered by paying particular attention to the communicating machines. Adopting a position consistent with (yet critical of) Vico's theory of historical evolution, Joyce is acutely sensitive to the problems of speech, script, and print and their inseparable involvement with the visual, the auditory, the kinaesthetic, and other modes of expression. His grounding all communication in gesture - for 'in the beginning was the gest he jousstly says' (468.5-6) - is underlined by the obvious play on a quote that Joyce lifts from Marcel Jousse, an ethnologist whose work caught his attention. By 1929 he had attended lectures by Jousse, who had developed a theory that language originated in gesture13 and had applied this to explaining aspects of the significance of the Eucharist in early Christianity, and so he associates Jousse's work ('jousstly says') with the opening of the Gospel of Saint John: 'In the beginning was the Word ...,' substituting 'gest' for 'word,' a substitu-

Singing the Electro-Mechano-Chemical Body

55

don which relates gesture, act, or deed (i.e., L, gesta), and the comic (jest). For gestures, like signals and flashing lights that provide elementary mechanical systems for communications, are 'words of silent power' (345.19). A traffic crossing sign, 'Belisha beacon, beckon bright' (267.12), exemplifies such situations 'where flash becomes word and silents selfloud' (267.16-17). (Note again the playing on John 1.14: 'The Word was made flesh.') Since gesture and ultimately communication are generated from and for the body, 'for the end is with woman, flesh-without-word' (468.5-6), an integrated process of communication arises which embraces all signs. The 'gest' as 'flesh without word' is 'a flash' that becomes word and 'communicake[s] with the original sinse' (original sin + originary sense + the temporal, 'since' [239.1]). The reference in 'communicake' to the mechanism of eating as paralleling the mechanism of speaking and to communion as participation in and consumption of the Word, attributable to Jousse's title La Manducation de la parole (The mastication of the word), treats the gest as a bit (a bite). Orality and the word as projections of gesture arise from the body as a communicating-machine.14 Orality, particularly song, is grounded in the machinery of the body's organs: 'Singalingalying. Storiella as she is syung. Whence followeup with endspeaking nots for yestures' (267.7—9). The link is rhythm, for 'Soonjemmijohns will cudgel about some a rhythmatick or other over Browne and Nolan's divisional tables' (268.7—9). Gesture with its affiliation with all of the neuro-muscular movements of the body is a natural script or originary writing, for the word 'has been reconstricted out of oral style into the verbal for all time with ritual rhythmics' (36.8-9). Since the oral is 'reconstricted' (reconstructed + constricted or limited) into the verbal, words also are crafted in relation to sound, a natural development being 'wordcraft': for example, hieroglyphs and primitive script based on drawings or mnemonic devices. Runes and ogham are literally 'woodwordings,' so that prewriting (i.e., syllabic writing) is already 'a mechanization of the word,' which is itself implicit in the body's use of gesture. An entire episode (1.5) is devoted to the technology of manuscripts and the theory of their interpretation — textual hermeneutics — for 'the proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture' (107.8). Even at this stage, the machinery of codification is implied, for ... on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world's oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced butnot punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively... (123.34-124.5)

56

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

The beginning of electric media (the telegraph) is a transformation of the potentialities of the early manuscript, just as the manuscript is of the 'wordcraft' of'woodwordings.' While codes are ancient, the mechanics of codification are important for the Wake, since the development of the Morse code partly marks the moment when the transmission of written language is electrified, which led to analysing language itself as a system of codes.17 In III.3 (the 'Inquisition of Yawn'), one of the four 'annalists' (analysts), the inquisitors, provides his explanation of the process of encoding and decoding required to interpret an encoded text, which itself is characteristically mechanical. Earlier, it has been asserted that Shem, the poet, is a Hermetic thief, an 'outlex' (169.3) - that is, an outlaw, lawless, beyond the word, and, therefore, beyond the law. Now this 'annalist' tells us the poet who originally discovers the reading and who did so by 'raiding' (that is, 'plundering' [reading + raiding]) ultimately invents a 'writing.' Seeing and hearing are intricately involved in this, so that the reader in reading this nightbook also becomes a 'raider' of the original 'reading-writing' through the machinery of writing. The resulting book is compared to an artefact of visual design, the Book of Kelts - a book 'in soandso many counterpoint words' — but it can be read only by the machinery of decoding for 'what can't be coded can be decorded, if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for' (482.34). This requires seeing the whole process as an extension of gesture language: ' ... I will let me take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman's tale posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas' (483.1-4). As mass communicating machines first appear, the machinery of writing intensifies and the encoding becomes more complex. First of all Gutenmorg with his cromagnom charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. 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. Fillstup. 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... (20.7-16) Topics (L, topos) and types (L, typus) as figures, forms, images, topics and commonplaces, the elemental bits of writing and rhetoric, are now realized through typesetting. Printing sets in place the 'root language,' which resides in the types and 'topes' (topoi) of the world through a multitude of codes consisting of material such as sounds, images, objects, movements, and gestures. References to the production of books and newspapers abound, including the

Singing the Electro-Mechano-Chemical Body

57

rise of publicity: 'the latterpress is eminently legligible and the paper, so he eagerly seized upon, has scarsely been buttered in works of previous publicity wholebeit in keener notcase' (356.21-3). 'ABORTISEMENT(s)' (181.33), 'newslaters' (390.1), dailies, weeklies, magazines, and other products of the printing press appear; for example: 'Reading her Evening World ... News, news, all the news' (28.21); 'Fugger's Newsletter' (97.32); or 'the Frankofurto Siding, a Fastland payrodicule' (70.6). Machineries and technological organizations accompany the development: reporters, editors, interviewers, newsboys, ad men (cf. Bloom in Ulysses). A new sense of urgency emerges: 'Stop. Press stop. To press stop. All to press stop' (379.6). Further effects on the ecology are noted for 'all the trees in the wood they trembold, humbild, when they heard the stop-press from domday's erewold' (588.33). This motif is related back to the beginnings of language in 'woodwordings' of a different kind, for 'the war is in words and the wood is the world' (98.34).19 Since later with electricity new electro-mechanical mass communicating technologies developed, Joyce's Dreamland is also a world of cinematic flow. Just as Hollywood saw itself as a dream factory20 producing reels of celluloid dreams, so it is said of the 'cinemen' (6.18) that they 'roll away the reel world, the reel world, the reel world!' (64.25), a world attractive to a Joyce who had looked into becoming a cinematic entrepreneur - that is, by setting up and operating the first motion picture theatre in Ireland - and who had later met with Sergei Eisenstein (November 1929) and talked with him about doing a film version of Ulysses?1 Joyce could see in film an engineered art of light, sound, movement, and, later, colour - all generated (as in a dream itself) by electricity, mechanics, and chemistry (and hence electric illumination). The action in the 'Feenichts Playhouse' (219.2) is a film, 'wordloosed [i.e., transmitted (wirelessed)] over seven seas crowdblast in certelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript' (219.16), with 'shadows by the film folk ... longshots, upcloses, outblacks and stagetolets' (219.23). In the closing book of the Wake, the coming of day, which illuminates a stained-glass window, is projected as 'Moviefigure on in scenic section. By Patathicus' (602.27), alluding to the pre-TV, filmed Pathe News, and to the 'conic sections' of light and sound that are important in cinematography. Key passages at the beginning, near the mid-point, and at the conclusion of the Wake all involve motifs of engineering or popular mass media technologies. The opening presents Master-Builder Finnegan, 'Bygmester,' who is also a mason and a Freemason, 'freemen's maurer' (4.18), and man of 'hod, cement and edifices.' Finn, who 'piled buildung supra buildung' (4.26), 'would caligulate by multiplicables the alltitude and malltitude' (4.32) to produce 'a waalworth of a skyerscape' (4.35) (i.e., the Woolworth Building) and a Roman wall, 'oftwhile balbulous' (Balbus was the builder of the Roman wall). There are also references to the Tower of

58 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics Babel ('with a burning bush abob off its baubletop' [5.2]) and to Latin, balbulus, stuttering, suggesting bibulous. There are further references to other terms associated with building (e.g., 'habitacularly,' from Latin, habitaculum, dwelling place). Near the mid-point, in a very dense passage, the innkeeper (HCE) appears as 'this harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole)' (310.1), where his presence is embedded in a description of an ear, of a transmission-receiver system, and of the physiology of the human body (309-10). In the conclusion, a description of the operation of producing the book - 'Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon' (614.27) — also appears to involve HCE's eating and digesting breakfast among a multitude of other processes. This concluding passage about a Vicociclometer' clearly illustrates both Joyces engineering and scientific interests and asserts that Finnegans Wake is a poetic machine. It brings to a climax the association of motifs of uttering (speaking or speaking through writing) and eating (consuming and digesting) as well as suggesting other processes of production and consumption. This linking of drinking and eating with speaking and articulating is also a component of the Alice books,23 for Alice is frequently involved in the conflict between the use of her mouth for speaking and its use for eating and drinking:24 One of the most murmurable loose carollaries ever Ellis threw his cookingclass. With Olaf as centrum and OlaPs lambtail for his spokesman circumscript a cyclone. Allow ter! Hoop! As round as the calf of an egg! O, dear me! O, dear me now! Another grand discobely! (294.7-13)

Shem as poet is particularly associated with these motifs of consumption through eating and drinking. After all, a Wake can easily be parodically associated with Hegel's definition of truth as 'a bacchanalian revel where not a member (soul) is sober.'25 Poets composing are compared to people consuming food and drink. For example, Glugg, another figure associated with Shem 'as pious alios' (240.33; pious Aeneas + Alice + alias), is 'bringing his portemanteau priamed full potatowards.' As we have seen, in Shem's study 'the warped flooring of the lair and soundconducting walls, therof... were persianly literatured' (183.8-22), among other 'abjects,' with a veritable cupboard for a recipe for making a 'bathetic' epic. What with 'curried notes,' 'quashed quotatoes,' 'potatowards,' and Alice's 'cookingclass' with its egglike productions, the interplay of eating and speaking, consuming and producing'His producers are they not his consumers?' (497.1) - comes to a conclusion with the description of the 'wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer ... (the "Mamma Lujah" known to every schoolboy scandaller ... )' (614.27-9). For this 'Mamma Lujah' (the history told of and by the four old men who appear again and again in

Singing the Electro-Mechano-Chemical Body

59

the dream, who are annalists-analysts) produces, just as the poet produces the poem or book, or as the digestive system reproduces the human body and its waste products; and consumes, just as the poet consumes to produce by interpreting and reading the runes of his world, or as the stomach and intestine digest the eggs eaten at breakfast for the body to process. The same duplex relationship between production and consumption will be found again at the mid-point of the Wake where an 'eclectrically filtered' engine (309.24), which is HCE as a 'tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler' (309.14), produces and transmits, while the 'lubberendth of his otological life' (310.21) (labyrinth as part of the ear and of the cognitive process) receives and consumes. Just as this description of the 'harmonic condenser enginium' (310.1) near the mid-point of the Wake concludes with a discussion of images, mirrors, prophecy, and memory, since 'its cartomance hallucinate like an erection in the night the mummery of whose deed ... immerges a mirage in a merror' (310.22-4), so the Svholemole millwheeling vicociclometer' begins with forgetting and remembering as the night world 'days': 'Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word' (614.20-1). Memory is constructive, described in machine-like terminology of mirror optics. During the 'night of mummery' in the Triv and Quad' episode in the schoolroom (II.2), this mirroring effect recurs: 'In effect I remumble, from the yules gone by, purr lil murrerof myhind' (295.4-6). Memory, associated with sound, light, and heat - 'After sound, light and heat, memory, will and understanding' (266.19-20) - depends on the electro-mechanics of the nervous system, the basis for the sensory system ('Meminerva' [61.1]).27 Sound and light as shaping memory are linked to optics and the mechanics of sound: '...A halt for hearsake. A scene at sight. Or dreamoneire. Which they shall memorise' (279.9; 280.1-7; the superscript 1 is Joyce's note in the text). The relation of the ear's digital analysis and the eyes' analogical aggregation turns the scene of sight and the dream of ear (also Eire, Ireland, and air) towards memory, which bridges past and future. The action of the Wake dramatizes how electricity, machinery, mechanics, and chemistry perform central functions in everybody's body. At the most basic level, Anna Livia Plurabelle as flowing waters is an engine ('an injon'), the circulatory system; while HCE is the electro-chemical nervous system. If the blood flows, it is because electricity keeps the heart beating: 'Here she is, Amnisty Ann! Call her calamity electrifies man. No electress at all but old Moppa Necessity, angin mother of injons' (207.27-30). When Humphrey (HCE) appears centre stage, he is described as an 'eclectrically filtered ... harmonic condenser enginium ... worked from a magazine battery' (309.36-310.1). If Anna Livia as the ever-flowing river is also the bloodstream of the dreamer in Finnegans Wake, and HCE is another major labyrinthine bodily structure, the neuro-muscular system, then their point of inter-

60 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics section is naturally enough the heart, an electro-mechanical muscular pump operated by the nerves to circulate the blood. HCE is frequently associated with pumps and pumping since as an innkeeper he 'pumps' the draft, and ALP's movements are also associated with the actions or results of pumping: 'It is polisignstunter. The Sockerson boy. To pump the fire of the lewd into those soulths of bauchees' (370.30-1). ALP, certainly thinking of the phallic pump as well, refers to her spouse, HCE, as a 'pumpadears': 'Struggling forlongs I have livramentoed, milles on milles of mancipelles. Lo, I have looked upon my pumpadears in their easancies and my drummers have tattled tall tales of me in the land' (545.24-6). The flowing rhythm of the 'languish of flowers' (96.11) of ALP is counterpointed by the discontinuous, on and off, telegraphic communication of HCE, the stutterer or stammerer, and the pumping of the male organ in orgasm. The description of the 'analectralys[ing]' of the 'chymerical compound' to revivify the corpse as the electro-chemical body is prefaced by how bodies will be brought 'rightcame back in the flesh, thumbs down, to their orses and their hashes' (67.5—6). The 'polisignstutter' is like an electric code, like dots ('orses') and dashes ('hashes'). As the rhythm of the blood is relatively regular and flowing, the rhythm of the nerves and muscles is dominated by the on-off electro-chemical activity of neuronic communication. HCE's rhythm is like bells striking, which is a code-like, on-off mode of communication: That he was only too cognitively conatively cogitabundantly sure of it because, living, loving, breathing and sleeping morphomelosophopancreates, as he most significantly did, whenever he thought he heard he saw he felt he made a bell clipperclipperclipperclipper. (88.7-11)

Here the bells are not only the beating of the heart, but the breathing of the lungs, the kinaesthetics of the orgasm, and the stuttering rhythm of the neuro-muscular system, which governs the other rhythms. The dreamer is cautioned about considering the book or the life it presents as explained by a Cartesian mechanism: 'Look at this twitches! He was quisquis, floored on his plankraft of shittim wood. Look at him! Sink deep or touch not the Cartesian spring!' (301.22-5). The Cartesian spring, mechanically dividing subject from object, is counterpointed to the poetic Pierian spring of Pope's Essay on Criticism. Here Shem's 'twitches,' like the nerves of everyone ('quisquis'), establish the mechanics of the individual as embodied. Understanding the machinic requires a deep exploration of the world as machine, an exploration which Joyce pursued throughout his books. Ulysses and the Wake comprehensively explore people's bodies and their intersubjectivity within the social machine of city life.29 While the

Singing the Electro-Mechano-Chemical Body

61

blood is the archetype for the flow of traffic through Dublin in the 'Wandering Rocks' section of Ulysses, the archetype associated with the library, the brain inclusive of memory, reads the books of nature, decoding the interplay of neuromuscular and blood streams. In the Wake HCE and ALP constitute one body, that of the dreamer. Their conjunction (wedding and marriage) — 'from a bride's eye stammpunct is when a man that means a mountain ... wades a lymph' (309.4—5) - quite literally plays on the two-in-one theme, the biblical motif used in the Roman Catholic marriage ceremony of two-in-one flesh. But this conjunction is also always related back to the mechanics and chemistry of copulation, for as we hear in 'The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly': It was during some fresh water garden pumping Or, according to the Nursing Mirror, while admiring the monkeys That our heavyweight heathen Humpharey Made bold a maid to woo (Chorus) Woohoo, what'11 she doo! The general lost her maidenloo! (46.30—6)

The four-part rhythm of the pump (the heart as well as the penile movement and male orgasm) is the dance of life, for 'the scheme is like your rumba round me garden' (309.7). Playing on the common trope of the electrifying nature of carnal love, Joyce relates the electric bodies to the act of copulation. Anna becomes 'Amnisty Ann! Call her calamity electrifies man' (207.28). Shaun as the priest, Jaunty Jaun, speaks of the climax of a tryst with a flower girl 'and swumped each other, manawife, into our sever nevers where I'd plant you, my Gizzygay, on the electric ottoman in the lap of lechery, simpringly stitchless with admiracion, among the most uxuriously furnished compartments' (451.28-32), while Anna and Humphrey are 'eskipping the clockback, crystal in carbon, sweetheartedly. Hot and cold and electrickery with attendance and lounge and promenade free' (579.5-7). To appreciate the play with electricity and machinery fully, it is now necessary to examine in further detail the closing moments of the Wake, where the description of the Vicociclometer' provides the most abstract and extensive passage about the body, the book, and mechanical, electro-chemical, and electro-mechanical processes.

5 Books, Machines, and Processes of Production and Consumption

As an early twentieth-century poet, Joyce embraces popular culture, communicating machines, machinery, and all signs of the times in his books. But the engineering of the communicating machines occupies a role of particular relevance, for they are of three kinds: traditional sign systems (hieroglyphs, alphabets, icons, drawings); technologically mediated modes of reproduction (books, telephones, film, televisions); and crafted modes of popular expression dependent either on the traditional or the technologically mediated (riddles, comics). All these communicating machines work on the same principles, and they all function within a universe in which communication occurs within an integrated semiotic system involving gestures, movement, sound, sight, demonstration, signalling, and the creation of non-phonetic and phonetic alphabets. To encompass all this within a printed book, Joycean communication is transverse,1 using an associative logic or alogic for 'reading [the] Evening World' (FW2S.20).2 The Wake is the 'machinic' design of a poetic engineer who in assembling his construction lets 'every crisscouple be so crosscomplimentary, little eggons, youlk and meelk, in a farbiger pancosmos' (613.10-13). But that pancosmos is a 'chaosmos' of'plurabilities' where 'every person, place, and thing ... anyway connected ... [is] moving and changing every part of the time' (118.21-3). This chaosmos is 'machinic,' for it is a dynamic system since the 'crisscouple[s]' are 'so crosscomplimentary,' which will become apparent in a later chapter via a discussion of quantum mechanics and the complementarity principle. The dream also alludes to this cosmos as a 'farbiger pancosmos' (613.11), linking conceptions of cosmos and cosmology with those of the pan-national, the ecological, and the ecumenical which pervade the concluding part (IV) of the Wake. Still, this immense chaotic 'farbiger pancosmos' has a disorderly order and is resplendent with colour (i.e., Ger., farbiger = 'coloured' + far bigger) for: 'Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled. Fuitfiatf (613.13-14).3

Books, Machines, and Processes of Production and Consumption

63

'Order othered' and 'nought is nulled' readily suggest the same kind of 'chaosmotic' activity, for nulling nought is obviously paradoxical, thus both asserting and denying the assertion simultaneously, while othering order is itself a form of orderly disorder. The rhizomic, nomadic nature of this 'order' is present in the sentence with its funereal gloss on the flower and plant imagery of the Wake, particularly as it relates to the neo-Viconian refrain from Quinet that is echoed two pages later - 'since the days of Plooney and Columcellas' (615.2-3).4 That the floral growth is rooted in the place of excrement is signalled by a reference to the Egyptian underworld, Amend - the 'increasing, livivorous, feelful thinkamalinks; luxuriotiating everywhencewithersoever among skullhullows and charnelcysts of a weedwastewoldwevild' (613.19—21), a labyrinthine wandering through the cyclical generation of life from death. That is still an 'order othered,' a growing life and a mode of intelligence - 'increasing, livivorous, feelful thinkamalinks' - which produces an excessiveness reminiscent of Bataille's vision of excess. Since this is followed immediately by mention of the machines working at the nearby Manor Miller Steam Laundry and by an extensive, abstract passage on the machinery of production and consumption, it reasserts the machinic nature of the resplendent universe of light and colour in the Wake, and of the production and consumption of books and letters. This key passage about the Vicociclometer,' about this book, and about processes of cultural production immediately precedes and introduces the final and complete version of Anna's letter, which is then followed by her closing soliloquy, the Wakes epilogue. A careful examination of the prelude to this passage and how it prepares for the final version of Anna's letter is crucial for understanding Joyce's conception of the poetic engineer as the contemporary 'Renaissance man.' Bernard Benstock has noted that just before this discussion of the Vicociclometer' or 'tetradomational gazebocroticon,' another Viconian theme is recapitulated:5 'Forbeer, forbear! For nought that is has bane. In mournenslaund. Themes have thimes and habit reburns. To flame in you. Ardor vigor forders order. Since ancient was our living is in possible to be. Delivered as' (614.7-10). Motifs of intoxication ('forbeer'), paradoxicality and chaotic order ('For nought that is has bane' [been + archaic form of death]), and rituals of death and rebirth ('mournenslaund' [mourning + morning]) accompany this Viconian theme for they are fundamental to Joyce's use of Viconian cycles and are also part of the basis of avant-garde taletelling. While 'themes have thimes,' times and chimes, the avant-garde poet approaches them through states of intoxication, hallucination, counter-logic, and disorder. To burn up energy and thus to be vital demands and furthers order and yet moves towards disorder (entropy), a paradoxical order, which by the previous state is made both possible and impossible. In this final episode, the Wake reflexively examines the way the book as a

64 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics machine is similar to other electro-mechanical and mechanical processes. Characteristically, that exploration is introduced with an emphasis on the role of memory in the activity of reading or interpreting: What has gone? How it ends? Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today's truth, tomorrow's trend. Forget, remember! Have we cherished expectations? Are we for liberty of perusiveness? Whyafter what forewhere? A plainplanned liffeyism assemblements Eblania s conglomerate horde. By dim deity Deva. Forget! (614.19-25)

For the moment it is important to emphasize the role that memory necessarily plays in activating the process by which the expectancies are transgressed to provide the poet's effects. Since memory occurs 'from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word,' its formations will communicate through human interaction, the pattern of the play and interplay of HCE and ALP. As the text indicates, this activity involves hope, a sense of the future, curiosity, and a sense of freedom: 'Have we cherished expectations? Are we for liberty of perusiveness?' These questions suggest that the freedom to peruse in such a way as to alter the reader s 'cherished expectations' allows the reader to grasp the 'plainplanned liffeyism' which rises out of the way that the 'conglomerate horde' of dear dirty Dublin's populace forms an 'assemblement.' Since Vico asserts that memory, imagination, and invention are all aspects of the same phenomenon, and while this passage is about remembering the dream and the night of the Wake,7 in a broader sense it is also about the 'plainplanned ... assemblement,' and thus the making of the book. The interplay between expectancy and code, expression and communication, is related to the motivating principles of HCE and ALP, whose joining together in the sexual act achieves one of the final epiphanies of the dream epic. The work will 'remember itself at one level because it is based on 'sound sense,' the 'sound sense' which permits a way of comprehending the code and context in which producer and consumer interact in producing the contact and the message. A fully articulated theory of memory and cultural production, which is oriented to every body's acts of production-consumption, unfolds as the passage proceeds. Through such a notion of the dialectic of forgetting and remembering, Joyce, in anticipation of the now current widespead recognition that what constitutes a text may extend beyond the written word, relates the reading of a text and the understanding of the language of a book to other modes and means by which people

Books, Machines, and Processes of Production and Consumption

65

express themselves, such as through their own bodies and through historical events. The Wake speaks of a person 'reading off his fleshskin,' which is a 'most moraculous jeeremyhead sindbook for all the peoples' (229.30-2). One can also read a variety of mediated modes such as 'foreign pictorials' or 'claybook[s]' (18.17), and ultimately even the universe itself as suggested in the rhetorical query: 'Can you rede ... its world?' (18.18), where the archaic spelling of 'read' suggests some of its additional meanings, such as 'counsel,' 'advise,' 'interpret,' and 'divine.' That Joyce - as Sergei Eisenstein's and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's remarks about the Wake implied8 - saw writing, speaking, and reading as multi-sensory activities involving secondary sensory involvement as well as the immediate involvement of eye, ear, and kinaesthetic senses is of primary importance to understanding the nature of his Vicociclometer.' In Understanding 'Finnegans Wake,' Rose and O'Hanlon comment on this long intricate statement concerning 'our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer' (614.27), which immediately precedes the letter written of Shem, brother of Shaun, uttered for Alp, mother of Shem' (420.17), which is followed by Anna Livia's final monologue. They point out that when this statement occurs it is breakfast time; eggs are being prepared and eaten, so that the process of digestion has taken place or is about to take place. This passage, which invites interminable interpretation, presents in highly abstract language a very generalized machinic model of production and consumption that is also the recorso of the schema of this encyclopaedic poem which consumes and produces, just as the digestive system itself digests and produces new cells and excrement. How else could one be a writer of'litters' and be 'litterery' (114.17; 422.35)? Or dig up letters in dung heaps, like Belinda, the hen? This concluding description of the production of the book or typed manuscript mimetically reproduces the operations of a communicating machine, for in this lengthy passage describing processes of decomposition and recombination, the production of the wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer' mimics the mechanics of the Manor Miller Steam Laundry. This poetic process, which is both mimetic10 and sensuous, is as sensuous a process as preparing, eating, and digesting eggs, and as mechanical a one as a mechanized laundry cleaning dear dirty Dublin's 'dirty linen' more efficiently than Anna Livia's washerwomen. As well as being the sound of the steam-operated, mechanical 'mannormillor clipperclappers' (614.13) of the nearby laundry, this Vicociclometer' is the book, the letter, the digestive system assimilating the eggs, the sexual process, the temporal movement of history, and a theory of engineering, for essentially it interrelates the production of cultural objects such as writing the book (the 'Mamma Lujah') and reading it with cooking eggs and consuming them. Joyce's 'holy book,' the 'mamafesta,' - the new gospel of 'Mamma Lujah' - is 'preprovided' with an 'expregressive process (for the farmer,

66 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics his son and their homely codes ...)' (614.31-2). 'Homely codes,' which once again relate the production of codes with the sacred (for these phrases are a play on the three persons of the Trinity), is equivalent to locating the Holy Spirit as immanent in the secular everyday world, for Joyce transforms the Holy Ghost into the vital spirit inherent in the holy codes of the natural world. The process of cultural production results from the technical semiotic process of encoding and decoding. Underlined by the remark about 'the farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch-as-hatch can' (614.31-3), this passage brings to a climax the frequent pairing of speaking (writing) with eating, already noted, for it is related to all the abstract machines which shape the life of nature, decomposing into 'bits' and recombining in the process of production and composition. Joyce, like Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson 'Dodgfather, Dodgson and Coo' (482.1) - plays with the surfaces of art and nature, and especially with the code-like aspects of language. Carroll's nonsense technique stresses the consumption of cultural production and its composition from elements ('bits'). In Sylvie and Bruno by 'Lewd's carol' (501.36), Carroll plays on the earliest meanings of a 'bit' as a 'bite,' for Sylvie says she must choose between eating soup 'made of bits of things' and seeing and hearing Bruno perform 'bits of Shakespeare.' Joyce's Wake contains an entire 'allforabit' (19.2), emphasizing this conjunction of expressing and digesting, for studying and accumulating knowledge itself is a digesting of bits: 'Steady steady steady steady steady studiavimus. Many many many many many manducabimus. We've had our day at triv and quad and writ our bit as intermidgets. Art, literature, politics, economy, chemistry, humanity ...' (306.11-15, L., manducabimus = we shall chew'). Machines work with bits and pieces, just as books are composed of bits and actors play bits of Shakespeare - 'shakeagain, O disaster! shakealose, Ah, how starring! but Heng's got a bit of Horsa's nose and Jeffs got the signs of Ham round his mouth' (143.21-2). Joyce even appears to intuit that electro-mechanical processes are also associated with 'bits' of information. By the 1930s, Joyce playfully, and perhaps prophetically, anticipated this association in the Wake by speaking of 'bits' in relation to TV broadcasting in a pub scene. He also anticipated how central sporting events or political debates would be to television when he described this TV projection as a fight or a debate being viewed by the pub's 'regulars' in what certainly must be one of the first fictional scenes in literary history involving people watching TV in a bar-room. Joyce's presentation of this image of the battle of Butt and TafF, which is peppered with complex puns involving terminology associated with the technical details of TV transmission, has its own metamorphic quality, underscored by the Viseversion' (vice-versa imaging) of Butt and TafFs images on 'the bairdboard bombardment

Books, Machines, and Processes of Production and Consumption

67

screen' ('bairdboard' because John Logic Baird developed TV in 1925). Joyce explains how the TV receives the composite video signal 'in syncopanc pulses' (the synchronization pulses that form part of the composite video signal) that come down the 'photoslope' on the 'carnier waive' (i.e., the carrier wave, which carries the composite video signal) 'with the bitts bugtwug their teffi' (349.7-11; my italics). 'Teleframe,' 'scanning,' 'spraygun,' 'caesium,' and 'double focus' in this passage refer to various other aspects of TV. Joyce imagines this TV receiver to be a 'light barricade' against which the charge of the light brigade (the video signal) is directed, reproducing the 'bitts.' Although (at least to my knowledge) 'bit' was not used as a technical term in communication technology synonymous with a binary digit before 1945, Joyce is still able, on analogy with the telegraph, to think of the electrons or photons as bits of information creating the TV picture. His playing here with the notion of bits is further reinforced by the reference to 'guranium,' a portmanteau formation from 'geranium' (suggesting strong to vivid red) and 'uranium,' for this reference links this TV passage with another set of parenthetical remarks about the same telecast - possibly the first in contemporary literature which is introduced by the phrase 'the abnihilisation of the etym' (353.22) - a phrase which weaves together references to war, to the destructive transformation of the natural world, and to the transmutation of language, and more particularly of writing, in our super-mechanized world. The etym is Joyce's imaginary unit for the etymological root and morphological structure of a word derived by elliptical reduction from the linguistic term 'etymon' ('the earliest form of a word that can be discovered from which its modifications are derived'). The atom was the basic unit of matter until 1919, when Lord Ernest Rutherford ('the first lord ofHurtreford' [353.23], an anagram for Rutherford) showed that uranium and some other heavy elements, such as thorium and radium, emit three different kinds of radiation, initially called alpha (a), beta (/?), and gamma (y) rays; thus anticipating the actual splitting of an atom in 1932 in the famous experiment by Cockcroft and Watson. Atoms and etyms transformed respectively by Rutherford and Joyce are seen to be based on a conception of assemblages of different bits. In the case of the atom, the discovery of the presence and significance of other bits led to its potential annihilation - smashing of the atom - a process in the discovery of which uranium played a significant role.11 For Joyce, TV's annihilating the etym alters the relationship of memory with the root language. Since the etym does not completely disappear, the process is an ab-nihilisation, not actually a destruction, possibly even some sort of a 'Chaosmic' parody of an 'originary creation' ab-nihilo.12 For Joyce, bits, 'the dialytically separated elements of precedent decomposition,' may be eggs, other things, or 'homely codes' such as the 'heroticisms, catastrophes

68 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics and eccentricities' (the stuff of HCE's stuttering speech or staggering movements) transmitted elementally, 'type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, with sendence of sundance' (614.33-615.2). All of these bits - matter, eggs, words, TV signals, concepts - are 'anastomosically assimilated and preteridentified paraidiotically,' producing 'the sameold gamebold adomic structure ... as highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it' (615.5—8). Through these bits an assemblage of multiplicities, different from a synthesizing or totalizing moment, is constructed, for this assemblage results from the crossing of pluralistic branches of differing motifs through a process of transmission involving flows, particularly the flowing of blood, water, and speech, and breaks, such as the discontinuous charges of electrical energy, telegraphy, and punctuation - those 'end speaking nots for yestures' (267.8). This 'assemblement' is HCE - everyone or 'Finnius the old One' (615.7). This complex, multiplex, perplexing assemblage is a result of the act of imagination, and therefore of memory, so that the history - 'heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities' - assimilated within the human person along with its social significance comes to be 'there for you.' This takes place within the context of the construct which is the 'man-god' that is Joyce's primary imagination, deus she nature, or the Buddhistic monistic 'tuone' (314.28). This assemblage is a god-machine or machine-god - Vrayedevraye Blankdeblank, god of all machineries' (253.33) — characteristic of a postNietzschean or 'antechristian' (114.11) world. The response as to 'how accountibus for him, moreblue?' (253.36) comes when 'the mar of murmury mermers to the mind's ear' that 'his thousandfirst name, [is] Hocus Crocus, Esquilocus, Finnfinn the Faineant' (254.18—20). The reference to the story of Crocus and the language of flowers suggests a resurrective overtone associated with spring, in which nature's revivifying machinery begins operating. But, then, this man-god is a 'hocus crocus' (hocus pocus), a builder who makes nothing, for all is 'splitten up or recompounded' in a creation that is de deo not ex nihila, in which the man-god metamorphically recreates himself. As the mock Latin verbal play on HCE's initials which alludes to the words of consecration in the Roman Catholic Mass - 'Hoc est corpus meum' - implies,13 the sacrament of this man-god commemorates the fact of immanence. The 'god of all machineries' is the food and drink, the body and blood - the Bios.1 It is an androgynous compound, as the concluding monologue asserts, for this 'mad Feary Father' merges with ALP, as goddess of mysteries, becoming a Parmenidean or Lucretian conception of'tuone' (314.28). As a god of earth, this 'Loud' will 'heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low' (259.7-8). This 'god of all machineries' comes to be known through the machinery of 'cycloannalism, from space to space, time after time, in various phases of scripture as in various poses of sepulture,' just 'in the way television opes longtimes ofter' (254.22-8).

Books, Machines, and Processes of Production and Consumption

69

Joyce can then describe his book because of its structure as a 'tetradomational gazebocroticon' and a 'mill-wheeling vicociclometer' (614.27); that is, a four-part spherically shaped structure partially, primarily, and sceptically based on Vico as well as other cyclical theories of history. As a 'gazebocroticon,' the book is a printed object — a '[-]boc[-]' — which is composed of a visual aspect 'gaze[-]' as well as secondary sensory aspects - '[-]icon[-]' - and mnemonic aspects (for '[-]rot[-]' is a pun on 'root'15 and 'rote' as well as 'wrote'). Thus, it refers to the concepts of sight (gaze), writing (or making a book), custom and memory (rote), the rhizome and etymon (root), and image or metaphor or representation (icon). This way of describing a book also plays with both the concept of physical illumination and of enlightenment, for 'gazebo [-]' refers to a particular type of gardenhouse having a turret-light, and perhaps in this context also illuminating the 'garden' of'flores of speech' in the Wake. A 'tetradomational gazebocroticon' is also a 'dome,' or the head; that is, the symbolic seat of a person's consciousness. The printed text is 'autokinatonetically preprovided with a clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process' (614.30-1), for rhythm and sound become crucial to part of its 'sound sense' and other operations. This assists the process by which the elements temporarily recombine, constituting the ambivalent conclusion - 'the coming forth by day' - of the Wake. Therefore rhythm, sound, and 'soundsense' have functioned as a 'clappercoupling smeltingworks' in the process of composition of the various pre-publication stages of Work in Progress. This, then, is a reflection of the mnemonic function of the interaction between sound and sense, and therefore of the role of memory in cultural production. But this also includes the various stages and levels of composition preserved in the notebooks, manuscripts, and published fragments. The 'clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process' is involved at all stages in the generation of the book by which Work in Progress becomes Finnegans Wake. These stages, which are similar to those occurring in the production of Ulysses, Joyce publicly marked by serial publication of his work in earlier versions, and in the case of the Wake, by the engineering of the critical reception of the work by sponsoring and guiding its Exagmination by Beckett et al. and by providing his associates, such as Valery Larbaud, Jolas, and Budgen, with keys to interpreting various passages. The actual elaboration involved in the 'complexification' of the text that is revealed by the many draft versions involved continuous reassessment utilizing sound, rhythm, sense, and memory. At this level, memory is 'autokinatonetically' based, though it is also related to the broader social and historical issues of the Vicociclometer,' which even penetrate the apparently analytic or structural level(s) of the Wake. The 'gazebocroticon,' then, works through a mechanical and material process of decomposition and recombination which is a deliberate satiric revision of the central organic and spiri-

70 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics tual theme of Romantic poetics and Hegelian aesthetics, especially in discussions of the poetic act as the foundation for every form of art in which the poetic imagination is described as dissolving in order to reunite. The doctrine of poetry as the reconciliation of opposite and discordant qualities stressed by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria is a classical example. The process is a machinically transformed revision of what Coleridge had described as the secondary (or human) Imagination: 'It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially vital.' Joyce, playing satirically with and revising Romantic texts such as those of Hegel or Coleridge, sees the gazebocroticon as receiving ... through a portal vein the dialytically separated elements of precedent decomposition for the verypetpurpose of subsequent recombination so that the heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past, type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, with sendence of sundance ... all, anastomosically assimilated and preteridentified paraidiotically, in fact, the sameold gamebold adomic structure of our Finnius the old One, as highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it, may be there for you. (614.33-615.8)

The Wake as a poetic work is virtually identified with the body of existence represented in resurrecting the sleeping (that is, dead to the world) and therefore symbolically deceased hero, HCE-Finn, Tinnius the old One.' This poetic work is a 'recombination' of the elements which have been separated 'dialytically' (by dialysis and dialectically) in the 'precedent decomposition.' This differentiating process dismantles17 semiotic elements present in the lived experience of those 'consumers' of the work who are also its 'producers.' The elements that are thus 'decomposed' undergo 'subsequent recombination' in new figures, which is the Verypetpurpose' of such activity, and that is why Joyce adapts from Vico the theme of the 'same anew.' Reconstructing the 'same anew' is accomplished by a process of polyphonic and polylogic figuration through transformation or metamorphosis. It is this process of'amplyheaving metamorphoseous' (190.31) which characterizes the activities of Shem, HCE's son, who is the 'penman' in his dream. Thus the activity of the imaginary has a means for metamorphosizing the 'heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities' - those heroic, erotic, catastrophic, and unique motifs of history - that are 'transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past' the movement of history as rendered through the artifices of tradition. The 'transmission' which through the production of the new work will 'be there for you' can only be achieved through the transformational and combinatorial devices of grammar, rhetoric, written language, and poetic presentation, for it must be shaped

Books, Machines, and Processes of Production and Consumption

71

'type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, with sendence of sundance.' This shaping is a reflection of the way in which the 'ancient legacy of the past' itself transmits history. Joyce, like Vico, is quite conscious of the central role of the fictive and poetic in shaping the historic, and of the indissoluble connection between cultural production and history in interpreting human understanding.18 The 'sendence of sundance' is an epiphany of the dynamic movement of the world that humanity inhabits - the light of the sun and the dance to the sun, the Tantric dance of Siva (cf. 597.24; 597.19; 80.24).19 This is the process through which cultural production incorporates the signs of that world and transforms them into the signifiers of poetry in all its variety of realizations. The 'sendence' (send + sentence + dense) is projected by the 'sundance' (light + movement + transcendence): 'type by tope,' poetically through the rhetoric of types and places (topoi) used in a tope-like manner of intoxication (tope = drinking); 'letter from litter,' through print and writing recreating human experience, which is embedded in the place of excrement — litters; and 'word at ward,' verbally through a watchful and defensive use of language. This particular process of transmission involves light, speech, writing, artefacts, the dance, and other modes of expression. Since poetic thinking involves types, topes, letters, words, and 'sendence,' the 'tips' and 'taps' of the Wake are also 'types' and 'topes,' being indicators of the slots or topics by which we classify reality. The 'type' in one sense contains the letters, words, and message that present the rhetorical topics ('tope'); the 'letters' provide a form for preserving the 'litter,' the mound of history; the 'word' acts as a guardian ('ward') of the past, creating a pattern of the future; the 'sendence' of the code is the mode of transmission and preservation operating through the play of dance and light ('sundance') in the Wake. The resulting 'sundance' is the culmination of a productive poetic act that transforms our understanding of nature and history. At one level, the artefact thus produced must be approached through an awareness of its 'homely codes,' for they provide the beginning point for the process of understanding through decoding and 'decord[ing]' (482.35). Joyce's writing depends on deviations from everyday language and transgressions of the presumed limits of speech, but in the process the counterpointed elements of the codes - 'crisscouple[s]' that are 'crosscomplimentary' (613.10-11) - can only be deciphered by attending to the differences dramatized by the 'nichtian language' (83.10), whose differences are grounded in the structure of natural languages, being based in etymology and semiotics. The idea of the Joycean text as a reconstruction of language from a new 'allforabit' by playing with elements or 'bits' and recombining them, critiques and extends the structuralist activity beyond the present moment into the dimension of history and beyond sign systems to their context in society. Joyce's 'comedy nominator' (283.7) partly depends on a play

72 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics with the probability of expectation (not dissimilar to what mathematicians speak of as stochastic processes), which operates when the sense of a well-known line such as 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever' is violated and becomes 'A king off duty and a jaw for ever!' (FW\ 62.35). This comic effect arises from playing with expectancies in a 'code' which is then 'decoded' and 'decorded' simultaneously by eye and ear. Barthes speaks of this structural activity moving through stages of decomposition and articulation, which Joyce's principle of the co-involvement of code and counterpoint likewise recognizes.20 The Vicociclometer' passage discussed above both clearly demonstrates Joyce's engineering, mathematical, and scientific interests and confirms that Joyce considers Finnegans Wake to be a poetic machine. It also culminates the association throughout the Wake of motifs of uttering (speaking or speaking through writing) and eating (consuming and digesting) and places them in parallel with other processes of production and consumption. This Vicociclometer,' playing on the rhythm of the Viconian cycles, which themselves are four-sided - 'tetradomational' - imaginarily squares the circle, as Joyce claimed he had done in constructing the Wake, for it creates a four-part structure which through its cyclical repetition becomes circular.

6 The Machinic Maze of Mimesis: The Labyrinthine Dance of Mind and Machine

Exploring in this and the next chapter the relation of Joyce's work to global technoculture reveals the important interplay between memory, metamorphosis, mimesis, the mechanics of meaning, and their relation to alterity ('otherness') within all aspects of Joyce's work. In a commodified world of things, the metamorphosis of any particular thing can only be achieved by transforming its utilitarian use value into gestural and semiotic values that operate at cross purposes to the utilitarian. Stereotyping, cataloguing, mechanical repetition, verbal play, and the entire arsenal of mimicry and mimesis contribute to this verbal assemblage, which is an imaginary prototype of the cyberspatial orchestration of media, retelling and retailing Joyces history of the world.1 Experiencing and anticipating further developments of the techno-cultural metamorphoses marking the end of the twentieth century, he apparently thought of Ulysses and the Wake as performances, which were an interpretation of the oral tradition of story-telling within the gestural history of the arts and the contemporary techno-culture. The role of the poetic in human development and communication is explored in book II of the Wake, which exemplifies the mechanics of poetic history through a Joycean adaptation of Vico. In book II, chapter 1, Joyce grounds the development of communication, expression, and the poetic art in mime and drama and allows it to unfold into the telling of tales, the making of films, and the producing of TV in book II, chapter 3, which involves the rumour and gossip of myth, legend, and everyday life. 'The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies' (II. 1) begins this history, using the children's game-playing as an originary 'model' of mime and drama. Their game-playing is presented as a film produced in The Feenicht's Playhouse,' which also entails the 'gossipaceousness' of a tabloid. This medley of media, involving suggestions of film, newspapers (i.e., acts introduced by Brechtian headlines - 'tubbloids'), puppetry, ballet, liturgy ('masses for the good folk'), dance, music, and spectacle, concludes like a contemporary masque 'to be wound

74

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

up for an afterenactment by a Magnificent Transformation Scene showing the Radium Wedding of Neid and Moorning and the Dawn of Peace, Pure, Perfect and Perpetual, Waking the Weary of the World' (222.16-19). As this Viconian multi-media-mini-drama moves towards its comic conclusion, as 'the producer (Mr John Baptister Vickar) caused a deep abuliousness to descend' (255.26-7), it is described as a medley of comic methods. It concludes with 'upploud!' and laughter, mixed with prayer and invocation - 'Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low' (259.7-8) - that lead to the next Viconian stage of development, which unfolds in 'Triv and Quad' (II.2). Here childhood gives way to adolescence, as the forms of communication and expression shift from drama and play to those of the schoolroom - disputation, dialectics, the diary, the epistle,2 and the management of symbolic systems (mathematics, geography, science, etc.). As Joyce writes to Budgen, 'the technique here is a reproduction of a schoolboy's (and a schoolgirl's) old classbook complete with marginalia by the twins, who change sides at half-time, footnotes by the girl (who doesn't), a Euclid diagram, funny drawings etc. It was like that in Ur of the Chaldees too, I daresay.'3 The disputation, dialectics, the epistle, and the commonplace book were forms studied as part of a program based on the medieval and Renaissance liberal arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric that Jesuit pedagogues used to teach the arts of communication, expression, inquiry, and memory to develop the understanding of sign, symbol, and gesture:4 'Where flash becomes word and silents selfloud' (267.16-17).5 As adolescence yields to maturity, the action shifts from the schoolroom to HCE and his customers in the pub below (II.3). Here Joyce explores the development of the public and social arts of entertainment and conversation. The model is storytelling, the telling of a tale. Over one-quarter of the words in the Wake that directly relate to 'tale,' and the same proportion that relate to 'story,' occur in this episode. As maturity nears its end in old age, the action shifts to four elderly men reminiscing. 'Mamalujo' (II.4), in which these four old men mull over and recount (retale, retail) the tale of Tristan and Isolde, parodically illustrates how old age preserves the past for the future by means of a history that transmits corporate memory chiefly through an anecdotal medley of nostalgia, remembered rumour, and gossip - the very stuff that creates myths and legends. This parodic blend of sentimental poetry and near-senile indulgence in malicious gossip characterizes the evangelist and the historian as annalists, makers of Barthesian 'mythologies,' for every night 'the four old oldsters ... all puddled and mythified' look 'to see was the Transton Postscript come.' From reading the paper (i.e., Boston Evening Transcript; cf. 111.9 and 617.23), these spinners of 'oldpoetryck' can produce their 'gastspiels' and 'dreams of yore' (393.30-6), since they 'collect all and bits of brown, the rathure's evelopment in spirits of time in all fathom of space' (394.9-10).

The Machinic Maze of Mimesis

75

These four chapters, which constitute book II of the Wake, show how a society constructs (or assembles) itself by developing competence in poetics and communication, thus demonstrating that the roots of the poetic are in play, in dream, and in dance and drama, with other forms being extrapolations or derivatives of these roots of the imaginary. They also stress the performative aspect of communication and poetry, so that the presiding deity of Joyces books, like the presiding deity of 'The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies,' is the 'Holy Genesius Archimimus' (219.9). Joyce's interrelating tips, topes, and types with gesture, speech, and writing through mimesis and memory partly locates his project close to Benjamin's theories of the evolution of mimetic behaviour in his essay 'On the Mimetic Faculty': 'To read what was never written.' Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages from the entrails, the stars or dances. Later the mediating link of a new kind of reading, of runes and hieroglyphs, came into use. It seems fair to suppose that these were the stages by which the mimetic gift, which was once the foundation of occult practices, gained admittance to writing and language. In this way language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behaviour and the most complete archive of non-sensuous similarity: a medium into which earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic.6

Joyce parts with Benjamin by demonstrating that the 'admittance to language and writing' of mimesis was sensuous and preserved traces of magic, supplemented by the traces of magic arising from the effects of science and technology in the everyday world. By combining dream as intoxicant with the interlayering of simultaneous levels of the mimetic through the linguistic machinery of the Wake, where the 'hieroglyphs of engined egypsians' can be compounded with rolling 'away the reel world,' enables Joyce to re-embody the supposed non-sensuous similarity through an invocation of the magic of technology as the alterity of modernity. Like HCE providing a civilization for ALP, Joyce provides his reader with a 'magicscene wall' (553.24). Note how the pun on 'magazine wall' permits another pun on a magazine as presenting a 'magicscene' in 'foetotypes' (324.1) and 'poetographies' (242.19). Joyce blends Mandrake the Magician from the comic strip (486.13)7 with history, mime, and the erotics of mimesis in order to reveal that the primitive magic implicit in the machine is paralleled by his development of an aesthetics of excess and transgression, enabling him to combine the erotics and dark laughter of Bataille with the mystery and mimesis of Benjamin. To explore the relation of mimicry, memory, and the 'meaning of meaning,' it will be necessary to explore the interaction and metamorphoses of the sensuous and the mechanical. People are, or everybody (HCE) is, simultaneously involved in a series of becomings - becoming machine, becoming nervous system, becoming insect (e.g., ear-

76 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics wig), becoming animal, etc. - and each of these becomings involves a process of miming or a mimetic process that is metamorphic. But this mimetic becoming is even more complex, for the embodied person is also revealed as a machine, and machines are revealed as mimicking human attributes. 'Here Comes Everybody' (typified as the Irish innkeeper Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, and abstracted as the initials HCE and the siglum 3) provides the comic focus in the Wake. Like Wyndham Lewis's Bailiff in Childermass or Horace Zagreus in The Apes of God, he does not just speak but mimics a loudspeaker in the way he broadcasts his views to his consumers. In the dream vision that is Joyce's Wake, this figure becomes at various stages a telecommunications machine, a radio receiver and transmitter. In the opening of the pub or tavern episode (II.3), he as the Host is called 'birth of an otion' (309.12), alluding to the ocean, to a little ear and an oracle (both little ear and oracle = Gr., otion), and to the title of Griffith s film The Birth of a Nation. The pub's regular patrons, 'Hiberio-Miletians and Argloe-Noremen' (309.11), appear to have donated a radio to the host, which is currently broadcasting in the tavern. In receiving information from his patrons and giving information to them, the Host is also acting as an up-to-date modern radio receiver and transmitter: 'their tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modern as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute' (309.14—15), a twelve-tube ('tolvtubular'), highfrequency short-wave radio set. HCE is here linked, on the one hand, with the imaginary retelling of the building of civilization depicted in Griffith s film and, on the other, with being both a friendly ear for his patrons at the tavern and an oracle broadcasting predictions of the future to them. This passage describes the radio set in detail, including its dial ('daildialler'),8 antenna system ('equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for distance getting' [309.17]), amplifier (see below), and speaker (Vitaltone speaker' [309.21]), and includes a multitude of references to radio, sound production, and electricity. The system of modulation, amplification, and demodulation which translates the waves for the speaker is 'connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini-Tosti coupling system' (309.18-19). The allusions to radio are intermingled with references to sound and hearing, especially music, for while 'a BelliniTosti coupling system' refers to pioneers of radio-telegraphy who developed an early radio-sensing device,9 Vincenzo Bellini was an Italian operatic composer and Francesco Tosti, a teacher of singing in London. This 'tolvtubular' device is probably also a radio detection system ('capable of capturing skybuddies' [309.20]), which naturally involves transmission as well as radio reception and broadcast. Joyce apparently composed this passage late in 1936,10 a year after Sir Robert Watson-Watt (note below the phrase 'one watthour' [310.25])11 concluded sixteen years of research successfully by producing in 1935 the prototype of Second World War radar systems. Furthermore, it is also an ama-

The Machinic Maze of Mimesis 77 teur radio transmitting station that receives and captures short-wave ('harbour craft emittences' [309.21]), and by implication everybody (i.e., HCE), wireless telegraphy ('key clickings' [309.21-2]), and man-made interference: Vaticum cleaners, due to woman formed mobile or man made static and bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound' (309.22-4). The Vaticum cleaner' is a portmanteau which recalls the fact that vacuum cleaners often interfered with early AM radios, but Joyce then associates this interference with the propaganda of the Vatican radio service, reinforcing the comic satire of vacuum cleaner with a blasphemous pun on the eucharist (L., viaticum).12 Further transverse interlinking of the human body with electromagnetic phenomena involves batteries, filters, gain controls, megacycles, and triode valves as well as electricity, static, engines, and ohms, a unit of electrical resistance: ... so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes. This harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole) they caused to be worked from a magazine battery ... which was tuned up by twintriodic singulvalvulous pipelines (lackslipping along as if their lifting deepunded on it) with a howdrocephalous enlargement, a gain control of circumcentric megacycles ... (309.24-310.7)

That the electric messages received are 'eclectrically filtered' continues the play on the distorted communication of Vatican propaganda with Church censorship (i.e., eclectic = church censorship13 + electric). Embedded within this passage and the next sentence ('They finally caused ... the pip of the lin [to] pinnatrate inthro an auricular forfickle ... a meatous conch ..." [310.8—12]) are two other related series which permeate the Wake: first, the movement of waves, including the flowing of water and the movement of electromagnetic waves that create radio signals as well as light and colour (the 'twintriodic singulvalvulous pipelines' are 'lackslipping along as if their liffing deepunded on it'); and second, the ear as a receptor of sound waves and the radio as a receiver of electromagnetic waves, so that the 'pip' (time signal on radio) 'pinnatrate [s]' into an 'auricular forfickle' (= Earwig, Forficula auricularia) and 'into the lubberendth of his otological life' (310.21) ('pinna' being the external part of the ear and 'lubberendth,' the labyrinth of the inner ear). The whole set of references to radio broadcasting is furthermore assembled so as to form a mechanized body, as John Gordon has pointed out.14 Body parts cited include the cranium ('a howdrocephalous enlargement' [310.6]) and the brain ('harmonic condenser enginium' [310.1]), the mouth (Vitaltone speaker' [309.31]), the eyes ('circumcentric megacycles' [310.7]), the heart ('magazine battery' with four beats 'Mimmim Bimbim' [310.2-3]), the arteries ('twintriodic singulvalvulous pipelines' [310.4-5]), front and back ('up his corpular fruent and down his reuctionary buckling' [310.19-20]), and the ears ('umbrella antennas for

78 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics distance getting' [309.17-18]). Nevertheless, the ear dominates the opening of the tavern episode (II.3) for, as Bishop has demonstrated, these paragraphs (309-10) contain a thorough technical description of the ear. Otological references to parts of the ear include allusions to the pinna or auricula, the inner ear or labyrinth, the tympanum, the rods of Corti, the semicircular canal, the space of Nuel, and the Eustachian tube.15 The ear listening to the Vitaltone speaker,' whether to speech coming through the mouth or broadcasting coming from an acoustic speaker, marks the importance of oral tale-telling and broadcasting in the pub episode. These particular passages indicate how the ear itself is like a radio receiver. They provide three equally possible alternative interpretations of this episode, which are overlayered: the description of an embodied person (HCE, the Host); a description of a communicating machine (the radio); and the description of a sensory receptor^) (the human ear and the tactile perception of sound waves in the act of hearing and/or radar). Structurally, these three series interact so as to clarify how 'everybody' (HCE) is a machinic assemblage of machinic assemblages. The hearing machine is one machine within the central-nervous-system machine, which is part of the bodily machine, and that bodily machine interacts with other such bodies and with machines designed by people (by exempla of an everybody) in the social world. HCE 'becomes-radio' as he 'becomes-ear,' for to some extent people take on the form of the machines they employ even though they have constructed those machines to take on and supplement some functions of the body. HCE, the innkeeper, as radio receiver, transmitter, and earwig - an insect which was legendarily believed to burrow or tunnel in the ear - is 'this harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole) they caused to be worked from a magazine battery (called the Mimmim Bimbim patent number 1132, Thorpetersen and Synds, Jomsborg, Selverbergen)' (310.1-4),17 an intermixture of a working machine and a person. As mole,18 HCE, just like an earwig, is a burrowing machine; and as a tunnelling machine, he also blasts forth as a torpedo or thunder, namely, 'Thorpetersen,' a portmanteau of the name of a thunder god, of the name of an inventor who designed a coil for lightning protection, and of an oblique onomatopoeic echo of'torpedo.'19 Joyce as an alchemical poet plays with microcosms reflecting macrocosms - the sound wave moving through the ear, the mole moving through the earth, the torpedo moving through the water, the fire of lightning moving through the sky for 'the tasks above are as the flasks below' (263.21). This 'magazine battery' from which HCE and the radio works is named 'Mimmim Bimbim,' the first part of which suggests 'mime,' 'mimic,' and 'mimesis' (imitation), an association that is picked up and developed in the ensuing paragraph, which is about story-telling:

The Machinic Maze of Mimesis

79

House of call is all their evenbreads though its cartomance hallucinate like an erection in the night the mummery of whose deed, a lur of Nur, immerges a mirage in a merror, for it is where by muzzinmessed for one watthour, bilaws below, till time jings pleas, that host of a bottlefilled, the bulkily hulkwight, hunter's pink efface, an orel orioled, is in on a bout to be unbulging an o'connell's, the true one, all seethic, a luckybock, pledge of the stoup, whilom his canterberry bellseyes wink wickeding indtil the teller, oyne of an oustman in skull of skand. (310.22-30) HCE, like Chaucer's Host in the Canterbury Tales ('canterberry bellseyes'), is an innkeeper, who is about to preside over a festivity of mimesis — the telling of tales and other ritual interchanges that will take place in his pub this night. Affiliated with magic ('evenbreads,' i.e., heavenbread or manna} and prophecy (cartomancy), the night of Finnegans Wake is a night of mummery (mimicry and memory) and particularly of commemoration of the dead. Mummery (mummifying, mimicking, remembering) of this night of light (for we have been repeatedly cued that this night is that night of nights, a night of light, a light shining in the darkness) emerges as a reflection of a mirage in a mirror. 'Mirage' can signify either an imaginary sighting of water - ALP or Izzy - or an indistinct, vaguely defined scene - a dream vision. HCE as operated from 'a magazine battery (called the Mimmim ...)' is a mime or a mimetic process, and here that mime or mimesis is directly linked to electricity ('the lur of Nur' providing 'one watthour'), to electrical communication machinery (the radio), to the machinery of the senses (particularly the ear), and to the flow of waves and water. Joyce exhibited an early interest in the mimetic principle as well as in engineering and machinery. In his Paris notebooks, Joyce interpreted Aristotle's dictum on art and imitation: e tekhne mimeitai ten physin - This phrase is falsely rendered as 'Art is an imitation of Nature.' Aristotle does not here define art, he says only Art imitates Nature" and meant the artistic process is like the natural process.21 This early denial of art as the reproduction of nature underlies Joyce's later use of mimesis in the Wake, for by then he realized that the process of cultural production is in and of itself a dynamic process, for it is a production machine that mimics the machinery of nature's productive process. This results from that process of cultural production, a specific reality in itself, that employs approximations of other aspects of reality to produce artefacts (products) and their effects and thus uses those approximations to construct a new virtual or artificial reality. Joyce understood Wilde's apparent paradox that 'nature imitates art,' for he understood how the

80

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

mimetic is modernity's primitive magic that enables intersubjective communication with others and makes the comic, satiric, or parodic modes the dominant modes of contemporary art. The dream web of the Wake generates complex comic and parodic intermixtures of technology, theology, mimesis, and bodily sensuousness and sensuality, as HCE aptly sketches: ... the touching scene. The science of that stilling! Here one might a fin fell. Boomster rombombonant! It scenes like a landescape from Wildu Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb as Mum's mutyness, this mimage of the seventyseventh kusin of kristansen is odable to os across the wineless Ere no oedor mere eerie nor liss potent of suggestion than in the tales of the tingmount. (Prigged!) (52.36-53.6) The mimetic is here interrelated with image, mimicry, the silence (muteness of a scene), and the mutations of metamorphoses. Echoes of the fourth book of the Portrait22 are interlarded with metamorphic suggestions of the mimicry of the technologized world, 'Boomster rombombonant,' a landscape from a film, and a wireless broadcast from overseas. The original Portrait passage ('Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man's weariness, the image of) is transformed within the dream version into 'some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb as Mum's mutyness, this mimage of.' This transformation accompanies a shift from a scene of the city of Dublin (the seventh city of Christendom) to its parodic personification in the mirage of'the seventy-seventh kusin of kristansen,' underlining the mimetic recreation of the alterity of the city of Dublin through 'Mum's mutyness' (mute, mutation) producing 'mimagery' (mime, imagery, mirage). In such a passage, Joyce comically dramatizes how he is mimicking his own mimesis, for the parody of the original vision of Dublin as that of a cousin of one Christiansen is 'odable,' audible or 'smell-able,' and odious or contemptible rather than visual, thus metamorphosizing the visual into the audible, the 'odable,' and the detestable or excrementitious. It is, as might be appropriate to a dream, a 'some seem on some dimb Arras' (the French town, but also one of the tapestries it produces), hence a 'mimage,' a mirage as well as a mimetic image. The metamorphoses of the senses that occur (one aspect of'mutyness,' i.e., mutation) stress the fluidity of contemporary technologically mediated cultural production, for as the introduction to the paragraph declares, 'Television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!' (52.18—19). The basis for this is the magic which underlies the mimetic that is necessarily a miming (taking 'miming' in an extended sense of interpreting one type of communication through another; e.g., language through gesture). The combined motif of sensory metamorphosis, magic, and mimesis occurs at

The Machinic Maze of Mimesis 81 the outset of the Wake, setting forth the dream world as an 'echoland' of Dublin ('So This Is Dyoublong? / Hush! Caution! Echoland!'): With a grand fimferall. Fumfiim fumfum. 'Tis optophone which ontophanes. List! Wheatstone's magic Iyer. They will be tuggling foriver. They will be lichening for allof. They will be pretumbling forover. The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves. (13.16—19)

'Optophone' refers to an instrument designed in Germany around 1912 to let blind people read. A photoelectric cell is used to scan a text and produce electrical signals that are converted into audible signals corresponding to the different characters. Since an optophone uses the ear (i.e., sound) to enable the blind to read, it 'ontophanes,' that is, brings to light things that actually exist ('reality'). Yet it is a kind of a counterfeit, for just like Wheatstone's invention of 'a box shaped like a lyre into which a pianos vibration passed and which then appeared to play itself,'24 it is a sort of prevarication, for the optophone is not able to recreate the entirety of the reality of reading. Nevertheless, through the use of an electrically produced audible code, it opens up crucial aspects of that reality to those who use it. These fictive reconstructions are similar to the poet's (ollaves were early Irish poets) universe of'harpsdischord.' To 'ontophane,' bringing things that are real to light, involves the visual as well as the verbal, both in that those printed words which the optophone scans are themselves visual, and in that these very same words invoke visual images, for an optophone produces a reading of images as well as the impressions of type. The optophone represents not only a tranformational process of sight into sound by electricity, but also encodes printed characters into a code created by sets of different audible sounds. An intriguing forerunner of present-day digital scanners, Joyce's optophone is an electric technology which appears to create virtual or artificial realities as poets do. This is a probing of the linguistic and cultural implications of the ability of electricity to transform one set of sensations (light, sight) into other sets of sensations (sound, hearing). Joyce is directly involved with the same problems as those implicit in Benjamin's particular understanding of the emerging techno-culture and the role of language, surrealism, mimesis, photography, and the other technologies of reproducibility (film, phonography, etc.) within it. Benjamin speaks of how the surrealist recognizes the mystery in the everyday world by means of a 'dialectical optic' that 'perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.'25 His dialectical image is the foundation on which an 'anthropological materialism' can be grounded for the collective is a body, too. And t\\tphysis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere where pro-

82 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics fane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself.26

The new technology enables this dialectical optic (or image), which is accompanied by the development of an acoustic and optical unconscious, for 'the film has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by Freudian theory.'27 Just as Freud's analysis of 'everyday life' made it possible to penetrate aspects of the surface of perception previously unexamined, the new technologies of the moving image perform a similar function for the the entire range of optical and acoustical perception. Joyce, like Benjamin, explored the new relationships among the verbal, visual, and auditory imaginations in the era of techological production, reproduction, and dissemination. For Benjamin, the dialectical image typified the transformation of those relationships within the instrumentality of the new techno-culture. The dialectical optic (or image), through its involvement in the new technology, contributes to the development of both an optical and acoustic unconscious that provides the ground for Benjamin's arguments concerning the dialectial potential of the new technologies themselves. Joyce's project 'dialytically' extends this further, transforming language itself to penetrate the mysteries of everyday life: first, in Ulysses, by utilizing the potentialities of, yet transforming, the interior monologue as the expression of a body passing through a technologized world by successively linking it to and embedding it within a number of different styles to go beyond what Benjamin describes as the 'dialectic optic' that perceives the everyday as impenetrable and the impenetrable as everyday; and next in the Wake he further radicalizes this process by exploiting the potentialities of the night, of dream, of day-dream, of hallucination, and of sleep as an Ur-model of intoxicated states to craft a language with which to mimic the mobile, audiovisual technology and spatio-temporal transformations of the new techno-culture. The use of dream and of this language allows the techno-culture to be embodied in people. Both projects are directed towards liberating people, producing a semiotic code which embodies those new technologies within people and plays up through parody the mimicking of humanity within those technologies. Joyces poetic vivisection transmutes God as Word into the 'god of all machineries' as code. The play of paronomasia, reducing the name of God to code, reoccurs in phrases such as 'The code's proof (364.1; i.e., 'God's truth').28 God as Code attributes the sacred to the creative act of the processes of cultural production. The Word per se is not privileged in the Wake, for in Joyce's world the beginning is emptiness, absence, so that the 'sound-dance' is the moment of consciousness between the void and the unconscious; that is, 'in the buginning is the woid, in the muddle

The Machinic Maze of Mimesis

83

is the sound-dance and thereinofter you're in the unbewised [Ger., unbewusst = unconscious] again, vund vulsyvolsy' (378.29-31). This dance is specifically related to the imagination as a productive engine, for the phrase 'lustily ... immengine' is applied to a word ballet '(tutu the font and tritt on the bokswoods like gay feeters's dance)' (337.19-20). The Wake further declares that its 'scheme is like your rumba round me garden' (309.7), a four-part dance that inscribes a rhomboid shape. The four-part shape of this dance dramatizes one of the relationships between the poetic and mimetic, on the one hand, and the mathematic and geometric, on the other, as the three siblings learn in the schoolroom (II.2): While, running about their ways, going and coming, now at rhimba rhomba, now in trippiza trappaza, pleating a pattern Gran Geamatron showed them of gracehoppers, auntskippers and coney-farm leppers, they jeerilied along, durian gay and marian maid-cap ... (257.3-7) The pattern pleated of 'ondts,' 'gracehoppers,' and cuneiform letters is the action of the book, an action that is gestural, poetic, mathematic, and musical. As Joyce's friend and colleague, Paul Vale'ry, writes: ... this art [dance], far from being a futile amusement, far from being a specialty confined to putting on a show now and then for the amusement of the eyes that contemplate it or the bodies that take part in it, is quite simply a poetry that encompasses the action of living creatures in its entirety: it isolates and develops, distinguishes and deploys the essential characteristics of this action, and makes the dancer's body into an object whose transformations and successive aspects, whose striving to attain the limits that each instant sets upon the powers of being, inevitably remind us of the task the poet imposes on his mind, the difficulties he sets before it, the metamorphoses he obtains from it, the flights he expects of it... What is a metaphor if not a kind of pirouette performed by an idea, enabling us to assemble its diverse names or images? And what are all the figures we employ, all those instruments, such as rhyme, inversion, antithesis, if not an exercise of the possibilities of language, which removes us from the practical world and shapes, for us too, a private universe, a privileged abode of the intellectual dance?29 Ezra Pound had spoken with some suspicion of the third mode of poetic intensification, as 'LOGOPCEIA, the dance of intellect among meanings,'30 but this is precisely what Joyce pursued exponentially in Finnegans Wake. The twenty-nine rainbow or leap-year girls, who, accompanied by Izzy, frequently dance during the dream action, also represent the code and the gesture, for they mimic 'the languish of flowers' (96.11), 'the languo of flows' (621.22), or the 'flowers of speech'

84 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics (318.28). They are the 'plurity of bells [and belles]' (568.5) of Anna Livia Plurabelle, the river Liffey flowing over the rocks in its bed. This eternal 'geomater' (297.1), 'Gran Geamatron' (257.4), who reveals herself in the patterns and designs people construct in exploring their universe, produces abstract and stylized forms and patterns of movement describing the ways in which the rainbow girls' and others' bodies move. For example, the rain hitting the leaves of a tree against a window-pane becomes the leaves' 'leafy speafing' (619.20); the rhomboid rumbas or trapezoidal tripping patterns of the rainbow girls are also figures that mimetically manifest the 'eternal geomater.' The patterns in a dance are like the figures of speech in that they are a series of gestures and movements that seem more complex and more ambiguous than people's movements and gestures in ordinary activity, yet still more ambivalently for often simple gestures and movements are an effective part of the dance. They are perhaps best understood in relation to the dance for, as Valery declares, hands speak and feet write, and Yeats could speak of the poetic, rooted in dance, as a 'thinking with the body.' Joyce's poetic is a 'thinking with the body,' in which the dance of intellect among meanings is the dance of a fully embodied brain and nervous system among a universe of complex, ambivalent phrases and sentences — a dance of the interlinked, multi-layered components of contemporary allegory. Joyce's apparent commitment to a poetics of gesture centred on rhythm provides the rhythmic as a common ingredient linking the choreographic, the geometric, the poetic, the communicative, and the machinic. In the 'Triv and Quad' (or schoolroom) episode, Dolph, the Shem-type, lectures Kev, the Shaun-type, on the geometrical nature of the mother. Dolph-Shem says that he is a master at 'rhythmatick' (268.8) who can explain the 'mythametical tripods' (286.23-4), which are the form of the mother as 'ann aquilittoral dryankle Probe loom' (286.19-20). Consequently, Shem-Dolph can tell the brother Shaun-Kev, Til make you to see figuratleavely the whome of your eternal geomater' (296.35-297.1), where the fig leaf is the triangular delta pinpointing the vagina. Sexuality, figures, leaves, rhythm, dance, weaving, speaking, and singing are all woven into these passages in which once again the ground of poetics, expression, and communication is the embodied person, for rhythm is inherent in the movement of human bodies. The development of dance exhibits its mimetic nature. The ancient dance known as the 'troy games,' or troia, or maze dance, is associated with the labyrinth as a geometrical pattern. Joyce like Shem had always had a 'lovom of labaryntos,' a fascination with various types of labyrinths: the linear one Daedalus built, the maze,31 and the rhizomic network.32 This fascination, which first surfaces in A Portrait and continues in the associations of Stephen's name with the 'fabulous artificer' in Ulysses, is also present in the Wake, since it is a 'sendence of sundance' (615.2). The serpentine or snake-like pattern of the labyrinth and of

The Machinic Maze of Mimesis

85

the movements in the 'troia' or maze dance suggests the strong mimetic association between the labyrinthine pattern and the snake-like movements that led these patterns to mimic those of the journey of the dead,33 and therefore to be intrinsically associated with the action of the Wake as a Book of the Dead. An interesting insight into the association of Daedalus and the labyrinth with mazes, networks, and the dance occurs in Ben Jonson's works, the complete edition of which Joyce claimed to have read in the Bibliotheque Nationale in 1903. One aspect of Jonson's works that must have fascinated Joyce were the masques. These 'happenings,' which resulted from Jonson's collaboration with the designer Inigo Jones, were shaped by a vision that was intensely cosmological and hermetic. The masque-like quality of the Wake (and even parts of the 'Circe' and 'Ithaca' episodes of Ulysses) should be noted, since the Renaissance masques were 'mixed media' forms emphasizing poetry, song, dance, and the visual arts.34 Two figures that occupy a significant place in Joyce's writings are central to Jonson's masque of Pleasure Reconcil'd to Vertue: Mercury, the god of communication, and Daedalus, the fabulous artificer. But it is Daedalus who, in three successive songs commenting on the maze or labyrinth and the dance, provides the resolution. The first of these three songs interrelates the weaving of 'curious knot[s],' the labyrinth and the maze, with the entwining movement of the dance: Come on, come on; and where you goe, so enter-weave the curious knot, as ev'n th'observer scarce may know which lines are pleasures and which are not First figure out the doubtful way at which a while all youth should stay, where she and Vertue did contend which should have Hercules to friend. Then, as all actions of mankind are but a Laborinth, or maze, so let your Daunces be entwin'd yet not perplex men, unto gaze. But measur'd and so numerous too, as men may read each act you doo. And when they see the Graces meet, admire the wisdom of your feet. For Dauncing is an exercise not only shewes the movers wit, but maketh the beholder wise, as he hath powre to rise to it.

(Pleasure Reconcil'd to Vertue, 261-72)

86 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics The second song ties the dance to the putting on of a figure 'that proportion or colour can disclose / That if those silent arts were lost, / Designe & Picture,' they might be relearned from this 'Laborinth of baeutie.' The third song deals with 'the subtlest maze of all,' Love. What Jonsons masque shows is that the Daedalian figure Joyce adopts is associated with all three types of labyrinths - the linear, the maze, and the rhizomic net - as well as with the dance.35 If Joyce remembered Jonson's Daedalus specifically, he is transforming and modernizing the figure, but the motifs that it brings out concerning the maze, its maker, and the dance are central to the Joycean use of the labyrinth-maze-nets in the Wake. In the 1950s Marshall McLuhan pointed out the central significance of this labyrinthine pattern in the Wake — a thematic emphasis reiterated by Eco in the next decade. McLuhan identified it as a mimesis of the process of cognition, arguing that it was associated with symbolist theories of Poe and Mallarme.36 Brancusi's famous portrait of Joyce is a maze-type labyrinth, and the Wake's fascination with the folk-tales of earwigs tunnelling in the labyrinth of the inner ear is manifested in the 'the lubberendth of [HCE's] otological life' (310.21). The encyclopaedia, which so fascinated Joyce that he would take a volume to read while travelling on the trams in Dublin, is itself associated with the open, rhizomic labyrinth of virtually infinite semiosis.37 But then the Viconian etymology that Joyce develops into a rhetorical device also manifests a rhizomic structure, as Bishop illustrates.38 Ultimately the motif of the labyrinth mimetically reflects the very processes of mimesis and alterity themselves, for at one point Finn as father is evoked to guide the children 'through the labyrinth of their samilikes and the alteregoases of their pseudoselves, hedge them bothways from all roamers whose names are ligious, from loss of bearings deliver them' (576.32-5).

7 Mimicry, Memory, Mummery, and the Multiplying of Media

In the Wakes dream world of complex mimicry, the word is enmeshed in the process by which everybody becomes another body, so that HCE as Yawn is told, 'In the becoming was the weared' (487.20-1; word + wear + weird + [root]),1 for the process of mimicry is both the 'wearing' of a new identity and the accompanying sense of weirdness. For example, the Voice of jokeup,' playing with words and letters, can transform Saint Patrick into 'Mr Trickpat' and can create ambiguities necessitating palindromic queries such as 'Are you imitation Roma now or Amor now' (487.22-3). Here the mimetic play of words and letters activates the mimeand-gest-performing machinery which produces the Wake. This production is based on a theory of the mimetic faculty strikingly similar to that of Benjamin, which invokes the memory of ancient reading - 'To read what was never written,'2 - for as Mutt tells Jute, 'He who runes may rede it on all fours' (18.5-6). Shem, parodist and mimic, a Swift and Chaplin type, parodies the 'homely gauche' (467.27) - the Holy Ghost - as disseminator of the word, declaring that the 'yestures' (267.9) or 'gest' (468.5) - gesture, jest3 - as an element of an 'embodied' code is the ground and thus the 'god' of that mimesis and empathy that are 'the voice of jokeup' (487.22). As 'flesh-without-word' (468.6), gesture contrasts with the 'Word made flesh' of Christianity, repositioning sacrifice and sacrament within a materialistic religious context associated with an earth goddess and echoing the 'flesh,' that 'organ' which Joyce celebrates in the concluding episode of Ulysses. The 'gest' is not just flesh, but the codification of the contrasting differences such as light and dark - for example, 'flash becomes word' (267.16) - on the central nervous system which constitutes communication as a focal aspect of the world of Joyce's book. Consequently, an artistic performance is an imperfect hypothesis, 'an imperfect subjunctive,' and while trivial and 'flappent' (468.9-10), it also works 'onamatterpoetic' (468.10), not only onomatopoeically, but also 'ona-matter-poetic'; that is, through poetic mimesis, sensuously transforming Ian-

88 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics guage, for this is what 'make[s] soundsense and sensesound kin again' (121.1416). The poet of the Wake is the amalgam of the characters in the dreamer s embodied mind, the consumers of global society, because the Wake as poem — like a dream - is a reflexive and intersubjective production. Reflexivity and intersubjectivity play far more predominant roles in the climactic episode (III.3), where the 'four annalists' examine the sleeping Yawn, than elsewhere. This episode, which has a significantly large number of references to art, poetry, imagination, divination, and related topics, reveals the corporate nature of its hero, showing Yawn as dreamer to be a composite of all the voices heard throughout, for while we are informed that the letter is the 'gist' of Shaun ('Shaum'), it is written in the 'hand' of Shem ('Sameas') (483.3-4). Besides, as noted above, since 'in the becoming was the weared, wontnat! Hood maketh not frere. The voice is the voice of jokeup, I fear' (487.20-2). This ambivalence of voices reveals the reflexivity involved in poetry's intersubjective communication, which is stressed through reference to Baudelaire (and Eliot) when Yawn declares, 'I am no scholar but I loved that man who has africot lupps with the moonshane in his profile, my shemblable! My freer!' (490.26—8). This refers back to one of the four who query Yawn about 'that letter selfpenned to one's other, that neverperfect everplanned?' which is a 'nonday diary, this allnights newseryreel' (489.26-490.2). This is a world where HCE's sin can be called a Virtual crime,' for in such a world the essential difference is not between reality and the ideal or imaginary, but between night and day, both of which are equally real, even if imaginary, for the dream's conception of this 'liwylong night, the delldale dalppling night, the night of bluerybells' (7.2), while self-reflexive, involves an allpervasive intersubjectivity as well. Consequently, one of the four daymen tells Yawn 'to change that subjunct from the traumturgid for once in a while ... [so] you may identify yourself with the him in you' (496.23—5), asserting: 'If there is a future in every past that is present Quis est qui non novit quinnigan and Qui quae quot at Quinnigan s Quake! Stump! His producers are they not his consumers? Your exagmination round his factification for incaminatlon of a warping process. Declaim!' (496.35-497.3) Although 'declaim' may easily carry overtones of bombast, the art of declamation, a teckhne, describes either the correct and expressive delivery of words set to music or the act of reciting a literary text with the proper intonation and expression. What constitutes the declamation which these sentences introduce is the description of the mourners arriving for the wake in order to be 'socializing and communicanting,' participating in the future present in Finn's past life. Here that process itself becomes hermeneutic, just as Yawn's description of it is hermeneutic, so that the action of the Wake is itself an 'exagmination,' just like the Joycean-engineered

Mimicry, Memory, Mummery, and the Multiplying of Media

89

interpretation of Work in Progress (i.e., Our Exagminatiori) in which Beckett et al. collaborated. The reflexive aspect of the Wakes meta-commentary is multiplex, as Joyce says, but not interminable nor susceptible of infinite renditions. If Finnegan is Quinnigan, then Finn is Harlequin, lord of misrule, whose spirit presides at his Wake. Finn as Quin is the core of this poetic communication in which producers and consumers intersubjectively merge. The questioning continues as to who, which, and how many participate in 'Quinnegan's Quake' (for people wake the one who croaks with song, dance, and drinking), which is also a reawakening or resurrection (shaking, trembling as in an earthquake). All of us — for 'his consumers are also his producers' - participate in a technical productive process — an 'exagmination,' a detailed inquiry of weighing, elucidating (ex + agere), and bringing forth from the multitude, the host (ex + agmin). So the inquirer asks Yawn to respond with a rhetorical declamation. Yawn's declamation concerning communication and participation as secular communion opens with the multitude (the '12') flocking to the tavern to participate in 'Imbandiment' (497.5) (the abandoning, yet imbanding) of 'Ad Regias Agni Dopes' (the scapegoat, the sacrificial lamb of Passover and Easter), personified in HCE as host in his mask (guise) as 'Dodderick Ogonoch Wrack' (498.23-4), Roderick O'Connor, Rex, the last pre-electric king of old Ireland, whose body is highlighted 'with the floodlight switched back' (498.25). As we have already seen, at this feast ('like the messicals of the great god' [497.7]) the participants eat the 'pani's annagolorum' (the Panis Angelica, the host, the bread of angels) and drink ale, beer, and stout. The '12,' the multitude, as consumer-producers are reproducers-interpreters whose communication is a social, communal, and ultimately a 'secular' communion, which also is a bodily and excremental process, a process as physical as the process of eating and as mechanical as the process of digestion. The senses perceiving the letter - sense - as a litter, a 'comicalbottomed copsjute (dump for short)' (110.26), reveal the excremental roots, the products of civil society. This is likened to the gradual electro-chemical deterioration of a photograph during the developing process: Well, almost any photoist worth his chemicots will tip anyone asking him the teaser that if a negative of a horse happens to melt enough while drying, well, what you do get is, well, a positively grotesquely distorted macromass of all sorts of horsehappy values and masses of meltwhile horse. Tip. Well, this freely is what must have occurred to our missive ... (111.263D The distortion from decay obscures the possibility of analysis, for 'the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen

90 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics saw' (112.1-2). Like the distorted photo negative, the letter becomes unclear, confused, rendering rational discursive interpretation extremely difficult. So, 'the interpretation of any phrase in the whole, the meaning of every word of a phrase so far deciphered out of it,' linked to the reductivism of the journalistic (i.e., 'however unfettered our Irish daily independence' [118.2]) and enmeshed in technicalia like divination (capnomancy) or infusionism (reading tea-leaves), will raise 'irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the lot' (117.35-118.2). Yet the concreteness of the solid, material, technological aspects of the letter establish its 'genuine authorship and holusbolus authoritativeness' (118.3—4). Vice's New Science, as the parodic structural book of the Wake, presents a theory in which the communication implicit first in emblems, medals, fables, and parables and later in interpretation and reflection is the foundation upon which the human community is constructed. Vico first demonstrates how the poetic plays a fundamental role in the construction of society and the political constitution of the state, then identifies Homer as the ideal example of a poet who inaugurates that poetic wisdom by which his people construct their social world. So the Wake is both an epic drama and a self-reflexive meta-fable; simultaneously a newer science and a meta-commentary on Ulysses. The 'Mamafesta' chapter (1.5), the first extended examination of the letter arid thus the book itself, centres on the arts and sciences of interpretation and the problem of the double hermeneutic. Stressing the technologizing of writing and communication, here the strategy of meta-communication is grounded in the exhaustive analysis and interpretation of the letter and the book. The letter, which is also a radio broadcast, a 'radiooscillating epiepistle' (108.24), records an oral message for 'the ear of Fionn Earwicker aforetime was the trademark of a broadcaster ... (Hear! Calls! Everywhair!)' (108.21-3). When it is said of the letter that 'on holding the verso against a lit rush ... [it] responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world's oldest light' (123.34— 124.1), the interplay of sign, silence, sound, light, dark, and contrast (i.e., difference) implies its involvement with a multiplicity of media of transmission - telegraph, radio, signal systems, speech, script, print, and animated film - relating the 'transhipt' (the transmission of the letter through a transcript) to a range of rationalized communication technologies. Technologies of reading, writing, and interpreting texts provide the focal point of the Mamafesta episode. With this focus on technologies of reading, writing, and interpreting, Joyce relocated one and eliminated another segment of the earliest drafts of the episode - a copy of the content of the letter and a description of its delivery- for both items deflected interest from the technical and formalistic strategy and tactics of textuality. This learned satire of textual scholarship unmasks the technologizing of the word implicit in palaeography and bibliography, expand g it to include the entire spectrum of mediated

Mimicry, Memory, Mummery, and the Multiplying of Media

91

communication and its material base that is central to understanding the nature of the letter, which in one aspect is the Wake. To examine the perplexing multiplexity of interpretation, Joyce playfully directs attention to the question whether one has 'ever looked sufficiently longly at a quite everydaylooking stamped addressed envelope?' (109.7-8). Using this figurative play with an envelope and relating it to the commonplace that 'language is the dress of thought,' he visualizes the material covering of a posted letter (its medium of transmission for being 'transhipt') as the erotics of clothing 'plaguepurple nakedness' (109.11). In order not to corrupt the 'soundsense' of a text, a balance must be maintained between concentrating on 'the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it' and 'the literal sense or even the psychological content' (109.12-15). This image requires close attention to the clothing, that which envelops (i.e., the envelope) the 'plaguepurple nakedness,' which is its contents, so that any text to be interpreted is multiply enveloped (i.e., the tropes by which the content is articulated, the sounds by which it is vocalized, the material medium by which it is presented, and the super- and intertextual context in which it is further enveloped). The reference to 'soundsense' underlines the fact that the relation of sound and sense is an envelopment that creates uncertainty as to which constitutes the envelope, because 'soundsense' is that event which constitutes the very literal surface of the book-letter and the literal level of interpretation encompassing the rhetorical exfoliation ('the language of flowers').5 This is dramatized by the presence in many European languages of an interplay of meanings within the word for sense and other words derived from it (e.g., sensation, sensitivity, sensibility),6 and by that particular relation the term 'sense' has to the central nervous system, the senses, which governs the mental life of sleep. This play of sense within the dream presents the 'metamorphoseous' (190.31) world of the 'proteiform graph' in which ads, 'funereels' (414.35), 'moviefigures' (102.27), 'newseryreels' (489.35), 'this swishingsight teilweisioned* (345.35), or the 'tellavicious (349.28) television (52.18; 250.33; 252.22) - and a multitude of other constantly shifting modes - provide the 'semioverse' of the Wake. The techniques of communication are constantly changing — the pen, paper, the medium of transmission, even the interpreters ('the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators' [118.25—6]), just as language does with its shifts in spelling, pronunciation, and other 'changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns' (118.28). Shem's 'song of alibi,' the poetic text, in all its protean transformations reflects the same traits as its world, for 'every person, place and thing' is 'moving and changing every part of the time' (118.18—20). This disquisition on the manuscript reveals that literary analysis can lead to premature closure for 'under the closed eyes of the inspectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody' (107.28-33).

92

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

(This is further underlined by the fact that HCE has closed his 'blinkhard's eyes' [109.21].) Joycean dream language is consciously mimicking audio, visual, and audiovisual media (phonograph, radio, film, photography, television) to reintroduce the magic of mimesis and sensuousity into the oral and the printed word. The episode in the Porter's bedroom (III.4) includes the couple's sex play and copulation, which is made public by being projected onto a window shade, so that 'O, O, her fairy setalite! Casting such shadows to Persia's blind! The man in the street can see the coming event. Photoflashing it far too wide. It will be known through all Urania soon. Like jealousjoy titaning fear; like rumour rhean round the planets' (583.1519). Playing on the fact that the satellites of Jupiter cast shadows on the planets surface (and possibly that Parnell is supposed to have used the code-word 'Satellite' when telegraphing his mistress, Kitty O'Shea), Joyce envisions the Porter's copulation being projected on the window shade by the light left on in the room. The Porter's love-making is described as a film script outlining the setting of a scene and the action. The action itself is later made a mimetic parody of Bloom in bed, for the creation of this 'Scenic artist' (560.13) that is produced by the light in the bedroom, 'his alladim lamps' (dim, but magic like Alladin s lamp), takes place 'around the bloombiered, booty with the bedst' (560.19-20). The proportional mathematics that produces these mimicries and their parodic reductionism has been developed in a much earlier episode (II.2) in a passage which interlayers film and mathematics:

thence must any whatyoulike in the power of empthoo THcllN the unitate we have in one or hence shall the vectorious ready-eyes of evertwo circumflicksrent searclhers never film in the elipsities of their gyribouts those fickers which are returnally reprodictive of themselves.1 Which is unpassible. Quarrellary. The logos of somewome to that base anything, when most characteristically mantissa minus comes to nullum in the endth:2 (298.11-21; superscripts and staggered typography are in Joyce's text)

This exemplum, used to illustrate the necessity of one of the fundamental principles of logarithms (i.e., that log x° = 1), also suggests that since such a principle is 'true,' the two brothers as bending and flickering circles and searchers can be filmically reproduced as their 'mimage[s]' (53.3).7 This sensuously linguistic mimesis is also epitomized symbolically in the schoolroom episode in a parodic vision of Izzy as panhysteric woman (Gr., panhysterikos, all-womb-suffering) and, hence, as earth goddess, like ALP, a source and maker of poetic tales: ... lead us seek, lote us see, light us find, let us missnot Maidadate, Mimosa Multimimet-

Mimicry, Memory, Mummery, and the Multiplying of Media

93

ica, the maymeaminning of maimoomeining! Elpis, thou fountain of the greeces, all shall speer theeward,2 from kongen in his canteenhus to knivers hind the knoll. Ausonius Audacior and gael, gillie, gall.3 Singalingalying. Storiella as she is syung. Whence followeup with end-speaking nots for yestures, plutonically pursuant on briefest glimpse from gladrags, pretty Proserpronette whose slit satchel spilleth peas. (267.1-11; superscripts are in Joyce's text)

The complexity of radical modernism (particularly in the 1920s and 1930s) creates the conditions for such multi-mimesis (media mimetically reproducing people's actions and then people mimetically reproducing the media in their action). For Joyce, the multi-mimetic is 'the meaning of meaning' (a phrase which deliberately echoes the title of Ogden and Richards's seminal book, The Meaning of Meaning [1924]). The above passage implies that the multi-mimetic generates the possible meaning (i.e., may mean meaning) of my own thought (Ger., meinung = thought, opinion). Mimesis of mimesis and a play of alterities are the ground of the dream action in the Wake. An example is the roles Izzy, her brothers, and her girlfriends perform in the children's play in the 'Feenicht's Playhouse' (II. 1). They take the parts of the angel (Shaun-Mick), the devil (Shem-Nick), and the maggies (Izzy with the twenty-nine rainbow girls) respectively in 'The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies.' Elsewhere in the dream there is role switching in this mime in which the bothers, male actors, appear mimetically to play the roles of women: ... all they who heard or redelivered are now with that family of bards ... as much no more as be they not yet now or had they then notever been. Canbe in some future we shall presently here amid those zouave players of Inkermann the mime mumming the mick and his nick miming their maggies... (48.6-11)

Joyce suggests that each of the series of others in the dream imitates another in a mimetic medley- the suave players of Inkermann ('the Zouave artistes ... original founders of the Theatre at Inkermann ... the female parts being performed by men')8 becoming the mimetic dream characters of Shem, Shaun, and ALP-Izzy, themselves dream characters of HCE's dream, which is a virtual mimetic machine, Freud's dream work. This mimicking of the mimetic (or mimesis of mimesis) also provides a means for sensuously understanding the complexities of technology and culture. Mimesis associated with contemporary technology and in interplay with alterity marks the closing interchange between Shem and Shaun in episode 1.7, describes Shem s lifestyle and opinions. This episode concludes with Shem as Mercius putting down Justius's (Shaun's) accusations against him:

94 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics ... you who ever since have been one black mass of jigs and jimjams, haunted by a convulsionary sense of not having been or being all that I might have been or you meant to becoming, bewailing like a man that innocence which I could not defend like a woman, lo, you there, Cathmon-Carbery, and thank Movies from the innermost depths of my still attrite heart, Wherein the days of youyouth are evermixed mimine ... (193.34-194.4)

The perpetual mimicking of one brother by the other in the dream is presented as a becoming, a metamorphosis for which one thanks 'Movies' as the creator, a substitute deity in the new techno-culture (it is worth noting that in the evolution of the text of the Wake, Joyce crossed out 'thank god' and substituted 'Movies' for God!). Becoming or metamorphosis assumes the position of the desired other by imitating her, him, or it. The association of the interplay with an other and the desire to imitate appears at the very outset of the Wake when a Jute meets Mutt in an encounter reminiscent of a music-hall routine or a comic-strip 'Mutt and Jeff: Jute. Mutt. Jute. Mutt. Jute. Mutt. Jute. Mutt.

Whoa? Whoat is the mutter with you? I became a stun a stummer. What a hauhauhauhaudibble thing, to be cause! How, Mutt? Aput the buttle, surd. Whose poddle? Wherein? The Inns of Dungtarf where Used awe to be he. You that side your voise are almost inedible to me. Become a bitskin more wiseable, as if I were you. Has? Has at? Hasatency? Urp, Boohooru! Booru Usurp! I trumple from rath in mine mines when I rimimirim! (16.17-28)

To encourage communication so that Mutt is more audible, visible, and coherent, Jute suggests that Mutt imitate him - 'as if I were you.' Immediately prior to this, Mutt, referring to the Battle of Clontarf ('the Inns of DungtarP),10 has already observed that 'Used awe to be he.' Now Mutt is a stammerer, thus inflicted with a relative sort of muteness, a state Jute describes as 'horrible,' though 'laughable' and 'audible' (hauhauhauhaudibble = haw + horrrible + audible). In the confusion, it is not clear whether it is a result of intoxication by taking too much from the bottle or a response to the battle that Mutt remembers ('when I rimimirim') which makes him tremble with wrath in his mind. But since Jute, declaring, 'Business is business' ('bisons is bisons'), bribes him, as the conversation progresses Mutt becomes more loquacious, while Jute becomes more monosyllabic and hesitant. Exchange of a gift and mimesis (role switching) has led to Mutt's becoming a bit more wiseable' so that he can talk about all the stories that have

Mimicry, Memory, Mummery, and the Multiplying of Media

95

occurred in this place or have 'fallen' on the page as if these letters from aloft were a movie: 'Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this plage, flick as flowfalkes, litters from aloft, like a waaste all of whirl-worlds' (17.26-8). This exchange of words and signs (the bison was the image on a U.S. nickel or five-cent piece) and the switching of roles permit the writing-reading of the 'claybook' - the text, an 'allaphbed' with its 'its curios of signs' - by the 'abcedminded' (18.17-18). While Joyce sees poetic invention, not language, as 'the highest level of mimetic behavior,'11 Joyce in his 'meandertale' and the last two-thirds of Ulysses reinvokes the magic of mimesis by transforming language itself in order to revive its sensuousness. In the concluding remarks of the description of the alphabet used in the manuscript uncovered by the hen in the Mamafesta episode (1.5), Joyce reminds the reader, 'who thus at all this marvelling but will press on hotly to see the vaulting feminine libido of those interbranching ogham sex upandinsweeps sternly controlled' (123.7-10). Since the gesture is always embodied, mimesis generating those song-lines that produce stories and histories is a sensuous machine, a process aphoristically captured in the phrase 'The mar of murmury mermers to the mind's ear, uncharted rock, evasive weed' (254.18-19). Memory is central to Joyce's theory-in-practice just as it was to Vice's system, for he endorses Vice's dictum: 'Memory is the same as Imagination.' The mimetic mechanics of memory appear throughout the Wake in passages such as: A scene at sight. Or dreamoneire. Which they shall memorise. By her freewritten Hopely for ear that annalykeses if scares for eye that sumns. Is it in the now woodwordings of our sweet plantation where the branchings then will singingsing tomorrows gone and yesters outcome as Satadays aftermoon lex leap smiles on the twelvemonthsminding? (280.1-8)

Introducing the final mention of the mechanics of the 'tetradomational' work just discussed, it has been noted earlier that Joyce quips, 'Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word' (614.20-1). Gesture and word operate as a communicating machine that is the ground of memory as well as of the reproductive rereading of the poem, for it is 'freewritten' for the analytical and selective ear (Gr., analektos, choice, select; and Gr., analexis, a picking up, gathering, selecting, reading through) and the synthetic eye exploring the woodwordings' of the Wakean forest (cf. the use of 'timber' in the title of Ben Jonson's prose meditation on poetic practice).13 Memory operates simultaneously, sensuously, and mimetically. There is not only the 'mermers' of memory 'in the mind's ear,' but also a framing of memories from 'the mind's eye':

96 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics I want you, witness of this epic struggle, as yours so mine, to reconstruct for us, as briefly as you can, inexactly the same as a mind's eye view, how these funeral games, which have been poring over us through homer's kerryer pidgeons, massacreedoed as the holiname rally round took place. (515.21-5)

When the sleeping figure of Yawn is asked for an inexact reconstruction, 'a mind's eye view,' of how these 'funeral games' (a characteristic component of any epic action) are a massacre and a masquerade of a Holy Name rally that is transmitted (or broadcast) by Homer s carrier pigeons as a creed for the masses and as the Kyrie and Creed of the Holy Mass, he pleads that he could only tell it 'afoul,' since he was 'drunk all lost life' (515.26). Chided to provide 'the whole plan of campaign' (515.27), he protests, 'Ah, sure, I eyewitless foggus' (515.30). The fog of forgetting14 is 'eyewitless,' since that remembering involves the mind's eye coming in contact with the 'touching scene.' There is a dual tension with alterity between 'yours' and 'mine' as the core of the 'epic struggle' in which the pagan funeral games mimic a Holy Name rally and the Mass mimics or masquerades as Homer's epic struggle. As noted in the previous chapter, along with sound and light being associated with memory, will, and understanding,15 there is also heat, a tactile or proprioceptive phenomenon, for all three components depend on the electro-mechanics and electro-chemistry of the central nervous system. The tactile aspect of Joycean theories of memory and mimesis has not received the same attention as the role of ear and eye, even though for Joyce tactility is probably the central feature of embodied communication, because the auditory and visual aspects of words are linked through the way that they emerge from rhythm and gesture. This relationship of tactility to the processes of language and mind and consequently to memory is affirmed at the beginning of the inquistion of Yawn. As the four annalists make initial contact with Yawn, they specifically relate the tactility of the senses to their method of inquiry. Yawn, who is sleeping on the dunghill or 'mudmound' of an orangery (the 'litter' where the original letter that is the Wake or the letter ALP writes in the dream is found), agrees that he has his letters or the letter with him within the 'litter.' The four 'annalists,' therefore, question him concerning a 'deuterous point audibly touching' (478.7) the letter or letters and his language, that 'malherbal Magis landeguage' (478.9), a language which is associated with the language of Bloom s parents, Hungarian or Magyar: 'There is this maggers' (478.7-8). Yawn's language is also associated with the gnostic mnemonic language of Bruno and the hermeticists, that magic language of the magi ('Magis'), for which the Wake provides a contemporary post-scientific substitute. This discussion of the magic language of memory and mimesis takes place between Yawn's mentioning his 'darling, Typette' (478.3) and his subsequent exclamation, 'Typette, my tactile O!' (478.26-7).

Mimicry, Memory, Mummery, and the Multiplying of Media

97

'Tactile O!' which is in apposition with Typette, is a pun on 'dactylo,' an early term for a typewriter. Two kinds of typing, either in the sense of producing it in print or in the sense of classifying it within its universe, are both essential elements in the production of any text, which is a communicating machine. Taken in either sense ('type' derives etymologically from Gr., typikos, 'an impression or imprint'), Joyce links 'type' and 'tope' (in the sense of place or topic) in five key texts (20.13, 136.10, 320.1, 599.23, 615.1) and associates 'tip' with one or the other or both in five texts (83.29 and all of the forementioned except 615.1). Thus Joyce confirms that in the Wake types and tips are connected to 'topes' (Gr., topoi = topic). This is important since Frances Yates has traced the history of the art of memory and the way in which the topoi, the topics, as the foundation stone of rhetorical composition, were associated with either real or imaginary 'physical' locations to provide speakers (and later writers) with an aidememoire to the structure of arguments. This concept of the memory theatre is developed in a number of her works, particularly The Art of Memory, those concerning the Elizabethan theatre, and most important for discussion of the Wake, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. A memory theatre, the basis of Bruno's and other Renaissance mnemonics, is a real or imaginary assemblage of icons associated with 'physical' locations — thus mnemonic loci1 that represent topoi, the stuff from which arguments are made.17 A relationship like the one noted in the previous paragraph about the types or topoi with physical phenomena is established in the opening episode of the Wake in a discussion of the nature of the printed book. Here 'types' and 'topes' are specifically linked to the motif of a leaf tipping on the window during the dream, acting like a finger tipping or tapping the face to provide a tip about the meaning, for paper is made of 'hides and hints and misses in prints' that lead to an acquaintance with 'Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies.'18 Shaun ties 'types' and 'topes' to tactility and poetry while discussing 'the strangewrote anaglyptics of those shemletters patent for His Christian's Em' (419.19-20):19 I am, thing Sing Larynx, letter potent to play the sem backwards like Oscan wild or in shunt Persse transluding from the Otherman or off the Toptic or anything off the types of my finklers in the draught or with buttles, with my oyes thickshut and all. (419.24—7)

As pseudo-poet, mimicking Shem, Shaun indicates the poet, like Oscar Wilde, 'play[s] the sem backwards,' and like St John Perse20 plays across (transversely) exotic historic cultures (Ottoman and Coptic), simultaneously traversing alterity and other differences. This is then associated with types and with playing anything off the tips of the fingers, interrelating tips, types, and topics ('off the Toptic'). So 'as it trickles out,' Shem as 'penman' supplements his weak and pornographic

98

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

'bardic memory' by 'delicate tippits ... thrown out to him' - including items 'touching' his evil courses (177.27-32). That notes and tidbits transmit and communicate both through and by the machinery of tips and types is reiterated throughout the Wake. To 'tell us all about' the primal mother, Anna Livia - as two old washerwomen do while washing their laundry in the Liffey - is to exchange 'notes and queries, tipbids and answers, the laugh and the shout, the ards and downs' (101.1—8), just as discussion of the farcical father occurs when 'this eeridreme has being effered you by Bett and Tiff. Tipp and Bett, our swapstick quackchancers, in From Topphole to Bottom of The Irish Race and World' (342.30-2). This interweaving of slapstick and horse racing with the televized battle between Butt and Taff, a retelling of the story of the father figure being shot by his son while he is defecating, also proceeds by tips and hunches, rumours and their effects. From the outset, the Wake plays on the centrality of the tip and type to the performance that produces the tale-telling machine. As we have seen, crucial passages at the beginning, the mid-point, and the conclusion of the Wake all involve motifs of engineering, construction, and the mechanics of art and popular media related to tips and bits and types. As master-builder, Finn-HCE's engineering feats erect this 'skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly, erigenating from next to nothing and celescalating the himals and all, hierarchitectitiptitoploftical, with a burning bush abob off its baubletop' (4.36-5.2), for such structures are also performances telling their tales (e.g., the tower of Babel). The portmanteau 'hierarchitectitiptitoploftical' contains roots associating Finn (or HCE) with both a high priest (Gr., hierarches) and chief builder (Gr., architekteo). It also suggests a framing or designing (Gr., tektaino). The former two attributions arise from verbal play with 'hierarchy' and 'architect,' while the latter with 'technic,' 'technology,' and 'technical.' An additional echo associates this construction with a hawk (Gr., hierax) — a bird both associated with Thoth as the god of writing and with Stephen Dedalus as artist.21 Finn as the first builder-engineer, first maker and first tale-teller, is further associated with tip and top, those of towers and those that constitute tales, for some of the first tales are architectural constructions - massive gestures in stone. So that the book as tale(s) architectonic construct(s) - is like a machine or engineering feat.22 In The Eternal Present Joyce's friend, Sigfried Giedion, discusses the dramatic mythopoeic beginnings of architecture, clearly demonstrating that towers tell tales. In one example, speaking of verticality and mythopoeia, Giedion shows how menhirs, single tall megaliths found primarily in the British Isles and Northern Europe, play a direct role in the Jute and Mutt encounter in the Wake mentioned above: Even now, Breton legends attribute to certain menhirs powers of growth, of wandering down to the stream, of giving forth sounds and mutterings. James Joyce, who felt the magic

Mimicry, Memory, Mummery, and the Multiplying of Media

99

attraction of these monuments, made Finnegans Wake- that modern legend of humanity open with a dialogue between two menhirs whom he named Mutt and Jute. Coincidences seem to occur in modern art, popular creation, and slumbering prehistoric remembrances. One of the comic strips in American papers has long had two characters called Mutt and Jeff, one tall and one short, who are continually in difficulties. This was certainly known to Joyce, whose dialogue between these two giant stones, Mutt and Jute, is carried on in a kind of dream language, expressing ambiguous half-formed words and speech. It is more utterance than talking. Words have not yet become detached from the stone block, from the silence of nature. [Quotes dialogue, .FW10-18]23

Giedion's coincidences, however, are rather a function of the fact that such megaliths and architectural productions are early exempla - types, topes, and tips - that constitute a material, constructed rhetoric. Comics reproduce menhir for Joyce because they are material typifications of topicalities. All cultural objects share with architecture and comics this ability to tell tales. Early in the tavern episode, the patrons discover 'their joke was coming home to them, the steerage way for stabling, ghustorily spoeking,... like the dud spuk of his first foetotype ... the filibustered, the fully bellied' (323.34-324.2). The joke is both gustatory, edible or quaffable, and a ghost story, like his first phototype, which is the dead spit of him, a dead ghost ('ded spuk' [spuk = spook < Ger., spuk]}. The 'foetotype' (phototype and prototype) or story-teller (i.e., fillibuster) is the Host appearing here as the Norwegian captain who tells 'his tail toiled of spume and spawn' (324.4-5), phrasing which suggests that the wake' of a ship is a machine ploughing the seas or 'the steerage way for stabling' (323.35). This is underlined by further references to the technology of communication machines for the paragraph is introduced by 'this dry call of selenium cell' (323.25) — an electric battery that is light-sensitive and used in photoelectric processes — and concludes with 'Thallasee' or 'Tullafilmagh' (324.9-10) - the sea (Gr. thalassa) - but also a play of tell and see, the earth (i.e., L, terra firma), and 'tele-film.' Seven lines later, a radio broadcast begins: 'Rowdiose wodhalooing' (324.18). In a commodified world of things, the metamorphoses of any particular thing can only be achieved by transforming its use value into gestural and semiotic values that operate at cross purposes to the utilitarian. This transformation of the commodified or fetishized object is amply illustrated in the Rabelaisian catalogues that occur throughout Ulysses and the Wake; for example, the treatment of people as things in the long lists of those attending the imaginary hanging in 'Cyclops'; or the cataloguing of Bloom's books or the content of a dresser drawer in 'Ithaca.' Joyce utilizes catalogues in the Wake as extensively as Rabelais does in Gargantua: a list of the names that a particular character is called; lists of books; lists of manuscripts or catalogues of place names; and, on a much wider transverse, intertextual

100 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics scale, in the ongoing catalogues whose items are distributed over the entire surface of the Wake and woven into the text (e.g., the inclusion of all the world's rivers or the thousands of references to songs). Particular songs, which are likewise transformed into motifs by repeated allusion, illustrate what happens to the object - in this case, the cultural object - in Joycean night language. Take the song 'Little Brown Jug,' which appears at least four times in the Wake.24 At one point, its words ('Ho, ho, ho. He, he, he! Little brown jug don't I love thee') become the movement of the river: 'Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay? (159.17-18). Shortly before that, when the Mookse is first about to spot the Gripes, the song appears again as the river flowing: 'My, my, my! Me and me! Little down dream don't I love thee!' (153.6-7), which links this song directly to a dance, 'the jig,' for the river's movement is also a kind of dance. The song title appears again when Glugg (Shem), while playing the game of 'Angels and Devils' with his brother, his sister, Izzy, and her friends, the flower girls, becomes angry because his sister and her friends tease him: 'The hopjoimt jerk of a ladle broom jig that he learned in locofoco' (231.31-2). Shem-Glugg's temper tantrum creates jig-like movement that is comically associated with the effects of opium eating ('hopjoint' is U.S. slang for an opium den). Elsewhere the song suggests another dance as a comment on HCE's presumed misbehaviour with the Welch fusiliers and the girls in the park: 'Hay, hay, hay! Hoq, hoq, hoq! Faun and Flora on the lea love that little old joq' (33.27-8). Finally 'L'il Brown Jug' appears as a musical instrument accompanying a comic interior monologue in the description of Butt's 'playing the spool of the little brown jog round the wheel of her whang goes the millner (341.4-5), which continues the pattern of sexual overtones present in virtually all of the transformations of this drinking song. This song, which has become fetishized and through broadcast and phonograph commodified, is used mimetically to mimic other things — a river's movement, a young boy's temper tantrum, a lewd encounter, or a musical instrument. This process goes further since the mimicking contributes to the excessive, over-exuberant language and profusion of meaning. In the song's appearance in the tale of the Mookse and the Gripes, the corn liquor as intoxicant is replaced by the intoxication of drugs - opium - and by the intoxication of dream as 'little brown jug' becomes 'little down dream.' In one way, the original function of the song disappears in the web of meanings, but in another way the song is freed from its stock associations and placed in a comic juxtaposition with the dream vision. In Ulysses the use of musical titles or song motifs, such as 'La ci darem la mano from Don Giovanni, demonstrates that Joyce had previously developed a simpler form of this strategy for playing with cultural objects as leitmotifs.25 Another formulaic use of a cultural object is illustrated by Lenehan's challenge regarding a

Mimicry, Memory, Mummery, and the Multiplying of Media

101

riddle that he makes while conversing with Stephen and others in the offices of the Freeman's Press. This incident in 'Aeolus' introduces The Rose of Castile motif. It is significant that some of the major symbols in that episode are machines - the presses, typesetting machines, and tram lines — the two modes of communication making Dublin an urban community. The conversation goes as follows: — But my riddle! he said. What opera is like a railway line? - Opera? Mr O'Madden Burke's sphinx face reriddled. Lenehan announced gladly: - The Rose of Castile. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee! (67.588-91)

The tram lines (or railway lines), the presses, and the cases of letters for typesetting can all be regarded as 'rows of cast steel,' so this cultural object - either the opera or the saint - invades the daily life of Dublin and provides a romantic and ambivalent religious comment on Dublin itself. This riddle appears on five other occasions: first as a rose in 'Sirens': 'O rose! ... Castile. The morn is breaking' (11.14); then as 'Last rose Castile of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone' (11.55); next, as a repetition of Lenehan s riddle, specifically associated with Blazes Boylan's impending assignation with Molly, who is mimetically associated with the 'Rose of Castile': Lenehan's lips over the counter lisped a low whistle of decoy. - But look this way, he said, rose of Castile. Jingle jaunted by the curb and stopped. She rose and closed her reading, rose of Castile: fretted, forlorn, dreamily rose. (LQ 1.328-31)

It recurs for the fourth time in Bloom's reflections on Mina Purefoy's labour, where Mina and Molly merge in an image involving Molly with a rose, a river, birth, copulation, and finally herself becoming the Rose: A liquid of womb of woman eyeball gazed under a fence of lashes, calmly, hearing. See real beauty of the eye when she not speaks. On yonder river. At each slow satiny heaving bosom's wave (her heaving embon) red rose rose slowly sank red rose. Heartbeats: her breath: breath that is life. And all the tiny tiny fernfoils trembled of maidenhair. But look. The bright stars fade. O rose! Castile.The morn. (11.1104-9)

Finally, it is resituated in bar-room sentimentalism and connected with modes of social machinery which tie it back to themes of seduction: Near bronze from anear near gold from afar they chinked their clinking glasses all, bright-

102 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics eyed and gallant, before bronze Lydia's tempting last rose of summer, rose of Castile. First Lid, De, Cow, Ker, Doll, a fifth Lidwell, Si Dedalus, Bob Cowley, Kernan and big Ben Dollard. (11.1269-72)

Lenehan's pun, ultimately permeated with echoes of commerce and technology, reveals the mimetic relationship between the people, their traditions, their everyday world, and their techno-culture.

8

Secularizing the Sacred: The Art of Profane Illumination

Joyce's title, Finnegans Wake, indicates that he is probing the secularization of the sacred in a rationalized techno-cultural world. This is why he uses an Irish wake, a specific folk mortuary custom involving comedy, intoxication, and transgression, as a major component of the title of his book. The word 'wake' has other senses relevant to Joyce; for instance, the mechanically produced 'wake' of a ship, plough, or another vehicle; the process of awakening as a looking forward or arising from sleep; or a revolution (i.e., uprising). But its primary relevance derives from the fact that the familiar bar-room song, 'Finnegan's Wake,' refers to the Irish wake, a mortuary ritual derived from the 'old religion.' Joyce is crafting his particular language to explore the entire new techno-culture, particularly the metamorphoses of the sacred in an era of technologization, since even a materialist world needs modalities for coming to terms with the problem of death. Moreover, since the new technoculture is itself an extension of the person and a transformation of nature, it can also be the ground for new modes of ritual and sacrifice and for elaborating the play of eros. Freud called modernism's attention to the play of eros and thanatos as a major aspect of the dream work. His using the concept of work suggests that this aspect of his theories was machinic, particularly since it was an early move by him to justify psychoanalysis as a scientifically grounded, rationalized technique. The activity of Freud and other psychoanalysts and the ambivalence of the psychiatric encounter appear in the Wake in relation to Lewis Carroll's nonsense books. Carroll's writings not only provide a partial analogue to the language of the Wake and a gloss on its play with logic and sense, they also contribute to the themes of transgressive sexuality and erotic behaviour that permeate the Wake. Alice, the character in Carroll's books, and the real Alice for whom Charles Dodgson wrote and to whom he read these books, both became subjects of the Freudian machinery of the unconscious: 'but we grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bit on 'alices, when they

104 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics were yung and easily freudened' (115.22-3). Here Joyce's strategy erects the contrapuntal play of young-Jung, fright-frightened-Freud (Ger., freude = joy) to embrace the contradictions existing within Carroll's Alice books between the comic world of childhood and nonsense and the Oedipalized world of psychoanalytic interpretation presided over by 'grisly old psychos.' This parodically unmasks Dodgson as an unconsciously suppressed paedophile and the real Alice, Dodgson s muse, as potentially an unconscious nymphet. Comments about these 'grisly old psychos' open up other aspects of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, particularly Joyce's treatment of the taboo and the sacred, of purity and danger. Early critics not only called attention to Joyce's interest in the demonic cultism of Huysmans, noting the presence of a Black Mass in Ulysses, but some even argued that Ulysses itself could be regarded as a Black Mass.1 While such a stance might seem to be extreme, it certainly is not extreme in speaking of aspects of the Wake in which its abstract, picaresque hero's initials, HCE, are associated with the first letter of each of the Latin words used in the Consecration of the Eucharist in the Roman rite of the Catholic Church.2 While demonic elements in Joyce associated with excess and transgression have always been recognized, their presence is frequently sanitized by associating them with the purifying rituals of psychoanalysis. Joyce's serious reservations about psychoanalysis and psychiatry, however, made him ambivalent, primarily about the work of Jung, but also about the work of Freud, Eric Havelock, and Krafft-Ebbing. Joyce's loss of his financial support from Helen Rockefeller because he refused to permit Jung to psychoanalyze him, his reaction to what he conceived as Jung's attack on Ulysses? and the failure of the psychoanalytic community to cure Lucia's mental illness could hardly have helped but contribute to his critique of psychoanalysis. If today there is an affinity between his work and the machinically oriented, anti-Oedipal views of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, it is partly because of Joyces satiric critique in the Wake of Oedipalized psychoanalysis, which reaches its climax in the analysisinquest-inquisition of HCE-Shaun as the sleeping Yawn in book III. While Joyce declared that he was monogamous, his commitment to a monogamous relationship involved the 'jouissance' of the 'pagan' sensuality of coprophilia, sadomasochism, and fetishism.4 In his imaginary fantasies, this post-puberty 'polymorphousness' even extended into further taboo areas such as incest, bestiality, and sodomy. This is partly why there is a strong focus on the sacraments of communion and marriage in the Wake and in Ulysses. Beginning with Ulysses, Joyce integrates factors of the structure of everyday communication with understanding and demystifying the body's relation to socio-political reality and existence in the biosphere. In Ulysses he quite consciously transforms the concept of corpus Christ? into the secular body of technologized Dublin through the use of special symbols, colours, techniques, and strategies, but most particularly through the association of

Secularizing the Sacred

105

Bloom with Christ and Bloom's body with the corporate body through the individual organs that are associated with each section. The City as the embodied word - the techno-cultural space where the populace communicates - is rendered forth through its human comedy so as to reveal the operation of prejudice, greed, propaganda, manipulation of labour, the plight of unliberated woman and man prefigured in the Lying-in Hospital and the brothel, and the respective roles of religion and of economic and political power in social domination. Since this is the manner in which Ulysses envisions the modern city, Mollys meditations on her erotic life, her sexual conquests, and her everyday life with Bloom reveal the immanence of the sacred in the contemporary life-world and dramatize the metamorphosis of the divine. Mollys soliloquy - which shocked so many readers in the 1920s - is nevertheless a mystical meditation on the immanence of divinity in the human person, particularly in woman as deity, for that immanence begins in the erotic life of women and men. This vision of a contemporary body politic as a corpus dei culminates in three crucial erotic visions: Circe, Ithaca, and Penelope. But this is simultaneously contextualized in Ulysses as the conclusion of a vivisective anatomization of the coporate body as a corpus dei. Joyce's brother, Stanislaus, commenting on the Circe episode, which takes place in Bella Cohen's brothel, noted that 'the relation or at least analogy between the imagination in the intellect and the sexual instinct in the body ... is worked out with fantastic horror ... It is undoubtedly Catholic in temperament.' Stanislaus implies that this episode as well as most of the rest of Ulysses views the sexual instinct as a daemonic secular sacrament. Since sexuality is a mode of communion and communication potentially directed towards reproduction (the creation of life), Joyce regards 'transubstantiation' (the metamorphosis of matter) as a poetic activity. Concerning the nature of transubstantiation as techne andpoesis, he reveals how he understood these different processes (conception and poetic production) as contributing to a delineation of the Sacred, for Joyce once remarked to his brother: Don't you think, said he reflectively, choosing his words without haste, there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in poems to give some people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic value of its own ... for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift, he concluded glibly.7

This viewpoint, as well as the association of HCE's name with the transubstantiated body, is fully consistent with Joyce's jesting, yet symbolic, act at a birthday party, as described by his friend Eugene Jolas: Once he celebrated, on the same day, his fiftieth birthday and the tenth anniversary of the

106 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics publication of Ulysses. The events were hardly noticed by the literary world, which was then discovering social realism and considered Joyce outmoded. On that occasion, we gave a small dinner at our home in Paris attended by Mrs. Joyce, Thomas McGreevy, Samuel Beckett, Lucy and Paul Le*on, Helen and Giorgio Joyce, and others. The birthday cake was decorated with an ingenious candy replica of a copy of Ulysses, in its blue jacket. Called on to cut the cake, Joyce looked at it a moment and said: Accipite et manducate ex hoc omnes: Hoc est enim corpus meum.'8

These words uttered at the moment of transubstantiation are the words that Henry Morton Robinson identified as the 'true' (secret and sacred) name of HCE, an interpretation quite consistent with the last rendering of that name in the Wake, which is 'Hardest Crux Ever': 'Every letter is a hard but yours sure is the hardest crux ever' (623.33-4) .9 There is a calculated ambivalence here because of the hardness attributed to the 'crux' (L., crux - cross), but in English 'crux' can mean either: (a) an essential moment, or crucial point; (b) the basic or essential thing; or (c) a puzzling problem. 'Crux' could also refer to the cross as a phallic symbol, the difficulty of interpretation of the book, and the Sacrifice of the Cross, which is commemorated in the act of consecrating the Eucharist. In the Wake rituals surrounding death and later those celebrated in the Catholic liturgy of the Easter Vigil are firmly grounded in everyday life - erotic and technological. As HCE dreams about his wake, the feasting and partying takes place in an electrically illuminated setting and evokes a modernistic multi-dimensionality, 'lying high as he lay in all dimensions' (498.25-8). Light and colour are present in the floodlight and the thirteen candles that illuminate the corpse, with the white light being split up prismatically - 'the spectrem of his prisent mocking the candiedights of his dadtid' (498.31-2). People have come from all over 'to contemplate in manifest and pay their firstrate duties' (497.21). The act of communion that is about to take place, which is highly erotic with polymorphously sensual overtones, is oriented to the senses - touch, taste, smell - and involves eating, drinking, touching. With its overtones of necrophilia, it still has strong and clear associations with communication, communion, and the sacred in the Wake. HCE's consort has earlier been named 'his pani s annagolorum' (the consecrated host, the 'bread of angels' [498.19]; i.e., Panis Angelicus, the title of a liturgical song sung at Benediction, meaning 'bread of angels') - a name embedded in this description of funeral feasting in which even the preparation of the 'bread,' reminiscent of similar descriptions in Rabelais's Gargantua, is described in elaborate technical detail '(at Kennedy's kiln she kned her dough, back of her bake for me, buns!)' (498.19-20). For this funeral feast is a contemporary form of pagan, Rabelaisian communion achieved through the everyday activities of eating, drinking, singing, talking, and dancing. The technique of cataloguing and of detailing

Secularizing the Sacred

107

descriptions of the mourners, their pedigrees and dress, what they drink and eat, locates the secular sacrament which is taking place here in daily existence - an ecumenical existence and a diabolical one. The technicalia underlying the description - such as thefloodlights,the 'fluorescent' (498.29), the 'spectrem' (498.31), the prism, the multi-dimensionality, the reference to arteriosclerosis ('arthurious clayroses' [498.23]) - contextualize it within modern techno-culture. An interplay of the debased and the exalted characterizes Joyce's treatment of sacrament and sacrifice. The eating and drinking become a combination of cannibalism and communion where, as we have seen, the participants at Finn's Wake are described as drinking his malt and beer 'sopped down by his pani's annagolorum' and 'socializing and communicanting in the deification of his members, for to nobble or salvage their herobit of him' (498.22-5), while also experiencing olfactorily the excremental aspect of death, for his corpse is 'lying high ... like the cummulium of scents in an kalian warehouse' (498.28—30). So it can be said, 'But there's leps of flam in Funnycoon s Wick. The keyn has passed, Lung lift the keying' (499.13-14), for as the 'keen' or mourning has passed and the king has died, the key, too, has been passed, so that the new king lives and assumes the power of 'the keying' - the 'key clickings' (associated with HCE at the opening of the pub scene). The pre-electric king of Ireland, Roderick O'Connor, has died to be reborn in the post-electric host, HCE. The underside, yet essential underside, of communicating is 'cant' (i.e., 'communicanting'), so that Finn's Resurrection can just as easily be a 'Rouseruction' (499.1). If the 'keyn' — the keen, the cry or wailing lamentation - has passed, the keying of the wireless and the sounds of the radio now resound, for as Yawn-HCE observes, 'If I can't upset this pound of pressed ollaves I can sit up zounds of sound upon him' (499.25—6). (Note the probable allusion to Ezra Pound.) Yawn's inquisitors also hear sounds - 'Was that a groan or did I hear the Dingle bagpipes Wasting war and?' (499.28—9) — and query: 'Rawth of Gar and Donnerbruck Fire? Is the strays world moving mound or what static babel is this?' (499.33-4). A medley of sounds follow — snare drums, the 'cry of t,' 'Zinzin,' and, echoing print and broadcast journalism: 'Christ in our irish times! Christ on the airs independence! Christ hold the freedman's chareman! Christ light the dully expressed!' (500.1416). All of which leads up to tuning in a radio: 'Now we're gettin it. Tune in and pick up the forain counties' (500.35). The satire links these barely concealed sinful violations of the sacred to playful connections of cant associated with technologies and media and also with fashion, advertisements, and excessive conspicuous consumption, such as 'foulardy pneumonia shertwaists, irriconcilible with true fiminin risirvition,' which is 'only holes tied together, the merest and transparent washingtones to make Languid Lola's lingery longer?' (434.19-23). This is a world of'Vanity flee and Verity fear!' where

108

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

the violence of eros plays hand in hand with the frills and scents, for 'whalebones and buskbutts may hurt you (thwackaway thwuck)' (434.25-6), and Autist Algy 'taking you to the playguehouse to see the Smirching of Venus will propose that 'you be an artists moral and pose in your nudies as a local esthetic before voluble old masters' (435.2-3, 5-6). Placed in this perspective, the second watch of Shaun, with Jaun as priest-confessor to the 'twentynine hedge daughters out of Benent Saint Berched's national nightschool' (430.2), is one extended play on the ambivalence between the violent, the sacred, and the erotic. The musical-comedy surface lightness of this section plays with motifs of incest and sacrilegious breach of spiritual trust, yet treats them with the teasing laughter of Byronic satire, such as Jaun s incestuous viewing through 'his eroscope' (431.14—18) of'his sister Izzy,' who is also his spiritual god-daughter. Jaun as priest, father-confessor to Izzy and to the flower girls, provides a crux for Joyces play with the ambivalence of the erotic, the sacred, and the sacramental and their manipulation by hegemonic power. Characteristic of this merging of the erotic with its embedded violence and the sacramental is Jaun's sermon, which associates a 'communionistic' (communal + Communist) communion with the celebration of the sensual and sexual and with a cynicism about clerical celibacy: Some time very presently now when yon clouds are dissipated after their forty years shower, the odds are, we shall all be hooked and happy, communionistically, among the fieldnights eliceam, Aite of the elect, in the land of lost of time. Johannisburg's a revelation! Deck the diamants that never die! So cut out the lonesome stuff! Drink it up, ladies, please, as smart as you can lower it! Out with lent! Clap hands postilium! Fastintide is by. Your sole and myopper must hereupon part company. So for e'er fare thee welt! Parting's fun. Take thou, the wringle's thine, love. This dime doth trost thee from mine alms. Goodbye, swisstart, goodbye! Haugh! Haugh! Sure, treasures, a letterman does be often thought reading ye between lines that do have no sense at all. I sign myself. With much leg. Inflexibly yours. Ann Posht the Shorn. To be continued. Huck! (453.30-454.7).10 Jaun's sermon rhetoric not only presents religion as a mode of advertisement and the manipulation of public relations, but also associates the sacraments such as 'communion' with the seductive pleasure and pain of commodified eros, 'Goodbye, swisstart.' Shaun's three watches (III. 1-3), as Joyce originally pointed out, are associated with the Stations of the Cross. In the second watch of Shaun, Jaun's (i.e., Shaun's) sermon transgressively weaves seduction and religious commitment or piety into a web of daemonic eroticism. His clerical rhetoric - 'So let it be a knuckle or an elbow, I hereby admonish you' (444.6) - is laced with suggestions of orgy, discipline, and bondage: 'It may all be topping fun but it's tip and run and touch and

Secularizing the Sacred

109

flow for every whack when Marie slopes Phil fluther s game to go' (447.7-8); or 'Gash, without butthering my head to assortail whose stroke forced or which struck hackly, I'll be all over you myselx horizontally' (444.17-19); or 'I make you reely smart. So skelp your budd and kiss the hurt! I'll have plenary sadisfaction, plays the bishop, for your partial's indulgences if your my rodeo gell. Fair man and foul suggestion. There's a lot of lecit pleasure coming bangslanging your way' (445.6-10). Jaun's priestly teachings are lightly disguised sadomasochistic eroticism in which Sacher-Masoch and de Sade are justified in terms of the theology of penance, plenary indulgences, and satisfaction for sins. His priestly ministrations simultaneously titillate Izzy and the flower girls into a medley of orgy and incest with Jaun. He is a mock anti-priest, who is using the liturgy and theology to justify a pagan, post-pubescent polymorphous sensuality in the name of Christianity. Consequently, particularly because these are the Watches of Shaun, the centrality of the liturgy, and particularly the liturgy associated with the Crucifixion and Resurrection, is essential to the way in which communion and other sacraments merge with the erotic machine in the Wake, partly demonstrating how on this base the church and state have built a mutually reinforcing political machine: 'Forgive me, Shaun repeated and there does be a power coming over me that is put on me from high out of the book of breedings' (409.33-410.2); or 'by the power of blurry wards I am loyable to do it' (425.11—12). The concern with the detailed technicalia of liturgy which permeates the structure of Finnegans Wake as well as Joyce's earlier work is partly developed to make liturgy a component of the artistic machine, but also to demonstrate liturgy's own ambivalent role as a rhetorical socio-political machine. Consequently, when Joyce asserts that the triduum and the Easter period are germane to the Wake, he draws our attention to his references to Stations of the Cross, the priests' prostrating themselves on Good Friday, the washing of the feet on Holy Thursday, and the blessing of the baptismal waters and lighting of the paschal candle on Holy Saturday. Also highlighted are the allusions made in the Wake to the office of Holy Week, 'tonobrass' (609.28), that is, Tenebrae, the Matin and Lauds which are sung the last three nights of Holy Week before the Easter Vigil.11 Readings from Lamentations and the Epistle to the Hebrews, which are part of Tenebrae offices, are both associated with Shem's writings - 'a jeeremyhead sindbook' (229.32) and 'a farced epistol to the hibruws' (228.34). These Easter allusions are further supplemented by allusions to identifiable sections from the Ordinary of the Mass, such as the Creed, the Confiteor, the Sanctus, and the Asperges. One of the very first vignettes Joyce composed when he began work on the Wake concerns an encounter between Saint Patrick and the High King's Archdruid on

110 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics Easter Eve, 432, which, as the dream ends at dawn, appears on a stained-glass window as it is illuminated by the sun. When in a later chapter the importance of this legendary philosopho-scientific and theological debate between Patrick and the Archdruid is examined, it will become clear how in the resolution of the Wake, Joyce links liturgy and the sacred to contemporary physics, optics, and theories of perception. Since the Easter Vigil is a feast of fire (light) and water, it can be contextualized within the techno-scientific exploration of the nature of light and colour and their relationship to the spatio-temporal world, tactility, and movement as both neuro-physiological phenomena and as sacred illumination. He utilizes liturgical material in great detail, and in choosing this particular example of the conclusion of the last three days of Holy Week, he deals with one of the oldest segments of Catholic liturgy, derivative from early pagan rituals: the blessings of water and fire on Easter Eve accompanied by the Eucharistic Lucernarium, the Exsultet which is sung at the lighting of the paschal fire at the Easter Vigil. To understand the interplay of light and darkness, of fire and water, and the stress on the night that shall shine as the day, it is important to look at the text of this ancient liturgy which Joyce comically machines and secularizes to sacramentalize the techno-scientific everyday life of the end of the second millennium. That ancient liturgy opens with a declarative exordium on brilliancy and light: Now let the angelic hosts of heaven, let the Divine Mysteries exult! And let the trumpet of salvation sound forth the victory of so great a king! Let the earth illuminated by the brilliancy, be glad and feel the splendor of the Eternal King in which she is flooded, hath chased away darkness from the whole world. Let the Church, also, our Mother, rejoice adorned with brightness of so great a light. Following this exuberant exordium which introduces the Lucernarium, the deacon then sings the Preface for the lighting of the paschal candle, the Exsultet, in which many Wakean motifs appear: the concept of the fortunate fall of Adam (the felix culpa), the daylit night, 'the Paschal solemnity at which the true lamb is sacrificed/ the Exile, the Passover, the sacred fire, the union of the heavenly with the earthly, the human with the divine, and the Utopia of justice and peace: It is truly meet and just that we should with the whole affection of the heart and soul, and with the help of our voices give praise unto the invisible God, the Father almighty and unto his only begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who for us paid Adam's debt unto his Eternal Father and with His gracious blood blotted out the bond of our ancient guilt. For this is the paschal feast in which the True Lamb is slain ... This is the night in which of old Thou didst bring forth out of the Land of Egypt our fathers ... This then is the night which by a pillar of light, dissipated the darkness of sin ... For what indeed would our birth have availed us, if we

Secularizing the Sacred

111

had not also received die benefit of redemption? O wonderful condescension of mercy toward us! O Thine inestimable loving-kindness to redeem us from a slavery didst deliver up Thine Son! O sin of Adam, which we might declare truly necessary, since it required the death of Christ to blot it out! O happy fault, happy in the making it necessary that we should have such and so great a redeemer! O night truly blessed, to be the one singled out as worthy to know the time and hour in which Christ arose again from Hell! Night of nights of which it is written, 'And the night shall shine as the day,' and 'Night shall be my light in my pleasures,' Hence the sanctification this night doth put to flight crime and wash away sin. Light and colour are crucial to the Wakes action, but it is the light of 'electrickery' as well as the light of day, for it is a world of fluorescence, floodlight, and arc lights. Joyce's dreamland is a night world bathed in illumination, for he associates HCE's night with Easter Eve, the Paschal Vigil, when the Easter fires are lit, for this is the night of which it is written: 'And the night shall shine as the day,' and 'Night shall be my light in my pleasures.' The ambivalence of such a daylit night appears in the Wake in remarks such as 'I've struck this daylit dielate night of nights, by golly!' (83.27), or 'for days there was no night for nights were days' (549.6); yet the night of the Wake is illuminated not only by fires and candles, but by modern technology: 'all Livania's volted ampire from anodes to cathodes' (549.16). The origin of the phrase 'felix culpd is also to be found in the ancient text of the Exsultet, which is probably the most rhetorically powerful statement of this theme. In the Wake the motif of'felix culpa' appears with a variety of sexual and scatological innuendos linked with biblical or theological formulae, often including machinic overtones (e.g., Tower of Babel, the world created by God ex nihilo}: 'If you want to be felixed come and be parked. Sacred ease there!' (454.34); 'But O felicitous culpability, sweet bad cess to you for an archetypt!' (263.27—30); 'He has had some indiejestings, poor thing, for quite a little while, confused by his tonguer of baubble. A way with him! Poor Felix Culapert!' (536.7-8; It., culo aperto = open arse); 'O foenix culprit! Ex nickylow malo comes mickelmassed bonum. Hill, rill, ones in company, billeted, less be proud of. Breast high and bestride! Only for that these will not breathe upon Norronesen or Irenean the secrest of their soorcelossness' (23.16-19). These formulae associate the phrase with production or building ('tonguer of baubble'); metals ('mickelmassed bonum' [nickel + Michael]); the use of automobiles ('If you want to be felixed come and be parked'); and a general parodying by association with a base metal of the idea of a non-materialistic creation ('ex nickylow malo'). This language of 'blasphematory spits' (183.24) is a language of excess and transgression, for its poet, 'Jamey Mockfarson,' is like Joyce and 'Shem always blaspheming, so holy writ' (177.23), for he is 'a boosted blasted bleating blatant bloaten blasphorus blesphorous idiot' (167.13-17). Jamey Mockfarson's strategies

112

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

extend beyond the transgressions of Bakhtin's carnivalesque, for like his contemporary Bataille, Joyce conceives the strategy of grotesque debasement as a transmutation of the object, a resituating of the sacred in the secular, so that Shem is 'Pain the Shamman' (192.23), a shaman or medicine man, a life-giving loaf of bread (Fr., pain], and a sham. Shem, who, as shaman, is an expert, for a writing down is a reading and interpreting, is the model or archetype of the interpreter: 'the shining key man of the wilds of change' (186.15-16). His explanations easily surpass those of officialdom, for in contrast to him 'the blond cop who thought it was ink was out of his depth but bright in the main' (186.18-20). Here is a world in which experts, like shamans, ultimately try to control the instruments of analysis and interpretation. A professionally and technologically mediated society where experts, like postelectric shamans, ultimately manage the instruments of analysis and interpretation would require the exercise of trust in the processes of bureaucratization and technologization, so that it is asserted that anyone 'would himself deal a treatment as might be trusted in anticipation of his inculmination unto fructification for the major operation' (232.7-9). This would be a world where the mechanics of trust, 'trusth' or 'thrust' ('he received in exchange legal relief as between trusthee and bethrust' [574.24]), replaces truth, 'thruth' ('the massstab whereby Ephialtes has exceeded is the measure, simplex mendaciis, by which our Outis cuts his thruth' [493.24-5]). In such a world, risk is disembodied and abstractly measurable ('Was his help inshored in the Stork and Pelican against bungelars, flu and third risk parties?' [197.19]), and experiment becomes vital to the continuation of social life, so that HCE is 'the huskiest coaxing experimenter that ever gave his best hand into chancerisk' (582.3-4). Risk is an intrinsic aspect of the techno-culture, for 'the solvent man' (HCE) with 'the wee wiping womanahoussy' comes 'terug their diamond wedding tour' (578.30-3): 'down the scales, the way they went up, under tails and threading tormentors, shunning the startraps and slipping the sliders, risking arunway, ruing reveals' (579.2-4). Professional terminology from stagecraft (tormentors, sliders, runways, etc.) is used to describe HCE and ALP descending the stairs, which are potential risks or threats, just as are other aspects of the techno-culture (e.g., insolvency). But the mimetic magic of the Shaman Shem, like that of the expert, challenges truth, questions trust, and confronts the techno-scientific world of chance and risk. In its night language irradiated with illumination, the verbal complexity of a single phrase can interrelate the religious, the sacred, the socio-economic, the techno-scientific, the ignoble, and the quotidian within vivisective, carnivalesque satire. For example, when Shaun, the orator-preacher-politician figure in the dream, expostulates that he does not know where on dearth or in the miraculous meddle of this expending umniverse to turn' (410.16-17), he intermingles Sir Arthur

Secularizing the Sacred

113

Eddington's explanation of the astro-physical theory of his Expanding Universe with words and puns concerning miraculous medals, middle, meddling, and metal linked to expenditure, omnibuses, and omniverse, the latter meaning both 'turned into one' (i.e., universe) and turned into all (i.e., the disparate elements of the world or, alternatively, turned into poetry about the whole cosmos). The verbal play on 'the miraculous metal of the expending world,' which links astrophysics, economics, and Catholic piety, shows how Joyce's socio-scientific examination and reconstruction of the community of redemption exposes the meddling of both industrial finance and clerical greed ('metal') in the 'expending' universe, which thus seems to be contracting rather than expanding. In playing with the pagan and the Christian, this modern Erasmian jester is constructing a transformation of the learned, encyclopaedic satire of a specfic episteme of the Englightenment, Cartesianism. This desacralization of the word is paralleled by a resacralization of the world and the body that involves a bridging of nature, culture, and technology. The climactic episode - the inquest of Yawn (III.3) - concludes with HCE celebrating in Whitmanesque poetry his building of cities and establishing of civilizations. This Whitmanesque celebration is a combination of assertions about the progress of humankind, about HCE's polymorphously sensual relationship with Anna Livia (including images of bondage and discipline), about the builder as an archetype of humankind's civilizing of nature, and about daemonic rituals of desacralization. As it moves towards a conclusion there are parodic, lightly cloaked references to a Black Mass reminiscent of those near the conclusion of the Nighttown episode in Ulysses: ... and added thereunto a shallow laver to slub out her hellfire and posied windows for her oriel house: gospelly pewmillieu, christous pewmillieu: zackbutts babazounded, ollguns tararulled: and she sass her nach, chillybombom and forty bonnets, upon the altarstane. May all have mossyhonours! - Hoke! - Hoke! - Hoke! - Hoke! - And wholehail, snaefFell, dreardrizzle or sleetshowers of blessing, where it froze in chalix eller swum in the vestry, with fairskin book and ruling rod, vein of my vergin page, her chastener ever I did learn my little ana countrymouse in alphabeater cameltemper, from alderbirk to tannenyou, with myraw rattan atter dundrum; ooah, oyir, oyir, oyir ... (FW552.26553.4)12 This vignette about the Black Mass opens with the Kyrie and the sounding of trumpets as Anna appears 'ollguns tararulled: and she sass her nach, chillybombom

114

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

[her bare bottom] and forty bonnets, upon the altarstane,' accompanied by the ambivalent refrain of'Hoke' (hail, Ger., hoch, and joke), and followed by the reference of her making water in the chalice. A parallel situation appears earlier in Issy's description of herself sitting 'astrid uppum their Drewitt's altar, as cooledas as culcumbre' (279.F 1.27-8). Shem, as the penman and shaman in this world, is 'you who ever since have been one black mass of jigs and jimjams' (193.34-5). HCE's Whitmanesque poetic pronouncement is deeply ambivalent, for in addition to its polymorphous sensuality, it is also a celebration of human productivity. Seen in the light of this section, the climax of the inquisition of Yawn that Joyce had dubbed 'Haveth Childers Everywhere,' Joyce's poetic vision of excess, like Bataille's, is grounded in death and materiality. The Wake, then, involves a vision of the central significance of death to the functioning of the erotic faculty in people's lives. Death as the ultimate discontinuity of human life is the ground of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, of an Irish wake, of the liturgy of the Mass for the Dead, and of other burial rituals which Joyce includes in the Wake. Joyce parallels these with that celebration of eros that Freud counterpoints against thanatos, but like Bataille, Joyces celebration is social. The very exuberance and excessiveness of Finnegam Wake is reminiscent of Blake's aphorism 'Exuberance is beauty,' which Bataille later uses as the epigraph for the first volume of The Accursed Share. The starting point in Joyce's composition of the Wake was the vignette of 'His Most Exuberant Majesty King Roderick O'Conor' (381.24-5).14 Energy permeates the Wakes physical world, whose inhabitants are dynamically expending this excess energy. Joycean economics clearly envisions a surplus expenditure of energy through orgy, intoxication, polymorphous sensuality, and sacrificial gift. The particular episteme at which Joyce directs his attack is post-industrial and involves Christian theology (the Roman and English Catholic Churches and evangelical Protestantism as well), Enlightenment thought (the industrial state and mechanism), and the manipulativeness of the new economic order. The learned satiric heritage, discussed in chapter 2, which Julia Kristeva associated with the contemporary dialogic novel,15 undergoes another major transformation when confronted with the agendas of the new techno-culture in Joyces work. Joyce reshapes and adapts this Varronian-Menippean satire to the new ambivalence of a popular tradition within the mass culture of technocracy. By crossing everyday cultural phenomena of the past, such as the Irish wake, with both the manipulated and the more genuinely popular cultural expressions of early twentieth-century Europe, Joyce develops a complex comic language for confronting the four major sources of power in global society as he perceives it: established religion, the state as an institution, the meta-national thrust of an emerging post-industrial capitalism, and the determinative force of global electro-technology. Joyce transgressively uses the wisdom of the body to demystify a hegemony of

Secularizing the Sacred

115

the new techno-world, as Erasmus did to demystify the intellectual technicalia of scholasticism. In order to transform transgressive satire to accommodate to the contemporary techno-culture, he adapts the Enlightenment conception of the poet as a designer (e.g., Pope's comparisons of the poet to the landscape gardener and architect) by divorcing it from a privileged relationship to the Fine Arts. This provides him with a conception of the poet as the proletarian designer of a language for a post-electric world - a new language, mathematical and technological, that would be uniquely constructed from the stuff of intoxication and dream. Conceiving of oneself as such a poetic engineer can easily be understood as sinking 'deep' to 'touch ... the Cartesian spring,' which is reinforced by including references in this passage to mathematicians, such as Etienne Be"zouts (301.28) and Blaise Pascal (cmy pascol's kondyl' [302.3]). Joyce explained to Jacques Mercanton 'his method of working according to the precise laws of phonetics, the laws that rule over all languages and preside over their evolution, since to do that was in his opinion to obey the laws of history.'16 Etymology and the history of languages permit Joyce to translate Vico's etymologizing into a technique for encompassing historical transformation and dialectic within individual words.17 The new language is partly achieved through treating the morphology or syllabary of Anglo-Irish and literary English agglutinatively - 'and tell her in your semiological agglutinative yez, how Idos be asking after her' (465.1213) - while historically and geographically relating that aspect of morphology to the morphology of other languages in other times and places. Joyce associates this strategic use of the agglutinative and the history of Indo-European languages with Shem, the poet, 'first till last alshemist' (185.35), writing over 'the only foolscap available, his own body' (185.36), with the mathematical rigour of an act of imaginary engineering: This exists that isits after having been said we know. And dabal take dabnal! And the dal dabal dab aldanabal! So perhaps, agglaggagglomeratively asaspenking, after all and arklast fore arklyst on his last public misappearance, circling the square ... (186.11-13)

Vico is used to transform the language of dream, wit, and slips of the tongue of the Freudian psychological unconscious into a metamorphosis of language which dramatically explicates or vivisects the sociological unconscious. Vice's importance to Joyce, as Bishop and Lorraine Weir18 both have demonstrated, cannot be underestimated, as the closing and opening clauses of the Wake clearly indicate: 'Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the ... riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs' (628.14-16; 1.1-3). Vico

116 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics (together with Bruno and Dante) provides the key to Joyce's view of the social function of the poetic in the new pre-millennial techno-culture, which provides him with a new, deliberately engineered or designed language. Dante is the image of the allegorical poet-satirist, associating Joyce with Benjaminian allegory. Bruno represents the poetic philosopher and occultist, associating Joyce with Benjamin s interests in the artist as theorist and the importance of occult traditions. Vico is the image of the ethno-historian of the poetic, providing Joyce's unique experiments with language and socio-political history. The heterodoxy of all three figures and Joyce's interest in learned satire link his vision of the excessive expenditure and the transgressive nature of the erotic and spiritual to that of Bataille. His social program thus proves consistent with the earliest moments of his literary career, enriched and expanded by the experience of living through the encounter of radical modernism with the new techno-society of Europe. But his function, like that of radical modernism, is to challenge the institution of art by providing a 'do-it-yourself-creativity-kit' whose long-term impact on culture should by now have become only too obvious. In the process, he exemplifies a language that everybody can ultimately use to provide profane illumination and the experience of the sacred in and through the everyday world and thus redeem the mimetic, sensuous, and reconstructive nature of the arts.

9 Assembling and Tailoring a Modern Hermetic Techno-Cultural Allegory

Walter Benjamin's analysis of the German Trauerspiel manifests the relevance of allegory to European modernism. While Joyces project differs from Benjamin's, Benjamin's analysis of allegory provides some important motifs and linkages in exploring Joyce's allegorical technique in treating the multiplicity of interlaced tales in the Wake and his strategies for adapting the allegorized Homer to a contemporary Ulysses. Benjamin draws attention to the affinity of allegory, with its disjunctive, atomizing principle,1 for the fragment and the rune (176). He stresses that allegory is a distinct form of expression (162), an alternative to speech and writing — almost an alternative language - and suggests that 'the basic motif of the allegorical approach' is to be found 'in a most surprising place ... the anagrams, the onomatopoeic phrases and many other examples of linguistic virtuosity' (207). Citing Henry of Ghent, he likens the allegorist to the mathematician rather than the metaphysician (227), and sees the melancholic wit of the allegorist as confronting the immanence of evil in the material world (cf. Bataille's preoccupation with evil and guilt) (224-6). While Joyce's secularization of the sacred moves beyond the preoccupations of the Baroque allegorists who composed Trauerspiel, many of Benjamin's motifs have a strong resonance in the practice of Joyce's final works and reinforce an understanding of his project to craft language anew and to explore its potential of providing for a profane illumination, a secularized epiphany. Consequently, before turning to Joyce's connections with contemporary mathematics and science, his allegorical crafting of tale and its effects upon his manner of telling, retelling, and even retailing tales should be explored. In the exploration, the role of the famous letter in the Wake will appear to be related to Joyce's allegorical interest and his non-sequential, counter-narrative weaving of tales. Radical modernist allegory, with an affinity for metonymy rather than metaphor, provides virtually a quasimathematical aspect to the composition of poems and readily lends itself to the use

118 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics of language to simulate the orchestration of the arts, for as Benjamin suggests allegory is an aspect of the spectacle.2 By associating Joyce with those three heterodox figures - Dante, Bruno, and Vico - Samuel Beckett's contribution to Our Exagmination calls attention to Joyce's work as radical modernist allegory, for each of these three figures in differing ways was deeply interested in allegoria or inversio. When Shem is described as being involved in 'breakages, upheavals, distortions, inversions of all this chambermade music' (FW\ 84.3-4), 'inversions' also plays on the role of Shem as hermetic allegorist (L., inversio, allegory).5 Joyces discussing with Budgen Fletcher's Purple Island in relation to Ulysses also indicates in part his interest in allegory. Joyce constructs his dream machine partly as radical modernist allegory, for the multiple roles that the Porter or Doodles family (The Doodles family, rn, A, -\, X, D, A, c Hoodie doodle, fam.?' [299.F4]) perform in the dream action clearly point towards the restructuring of allegory Joyce undertakes. For example, there are the twins: c (Shem) is a poet, a scribe, an outlaw, anti-priest, introvert; while A (Shaun) is an orator, a postman, a politician, a priest. In each of these roles as well as in their roles as brothers, sons, and twins, they contribute a variety of semiotic functions within the Wakes poetic logic. The dream figures - HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun, Izzy, and others - are at one level, as the Doodles family suggests, abstractions that can be transformed. This is one of the purposes of the sigla with which Joyce associates his major characters, events, and the varying contexts within which they operate. McHugh, in urging 'the sigla approach' to the Wake, intuited the way in which the dream characters simultaneously perform a variety of roles that are functions of the sigla as variables. This is made clear in the exegesis of the 'Mamafesta' episode (1.5), which immediately precedes the episode (1.6) introducing the key characters and contexts through twelve questions and answers. Ulysses was also conceived in a similar way, as Joyce hinted in his conversations with Budgen, for Joyces two existing structural plans of Ulysses are allegorical, organizational flow-charts reconstructing the book's principles of composition, which had been partly constructed in the light of an awareness of centuries of allegorical interpretation of the Odyssey. Joyce's recognition of the allegorical, hermetic potential of a contemporary transformation of the Alexandrian tradition of compressed epic or epyllia began with his citing of Ovid when he christened the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Dedal us - a decision that links the machinic and the labyrinthine cognition of poetic discovery, but that also opts for a specific commitment to writing which is a multiplex assemblage of'tales within wheels' (FW247.3) for every 'telling has a tailing' (FW213.12). The Alexandrian period marks the post-literate beginnings of an invitation to expansive, polysemic exegesis involving multiple lev-

Assembling and Tailoring a Modern Hermetic Techno-Cultural Allegory

119

els (the 'polyexegetical'), and thus complex allegorical interpretation; it also is key in transmitting that hermetic gnosticism that surrounds the alchemical figure of Shem in the Wake, for whom 'the tasks above are as the flasks below, saith the emerald canticle of Hermes' (263.21-2). While some scholars such as David Hayman have recognized Joyce as an allegorist, producing a 'a larger semi/mock/metaphysical allegory of universal presence' in Finnegans Wake,7 this has not become a more general theme of main-line Joycean interpretation. Allegory, because of its apparent affinity for the machinic as opposed to the organic, seemed anathema to many modernists, even though some segments of the Continental avant-garde, such as Benjamin during the Weimar period of German modernism, developed complex modernist theories about allegory.8 Like Spenser's and Dante's allegory (or like the adaptations of allegory by Pope and Swift in their neo-Augustan satire), Joyce uses allegory as a complex semiotic system in which his other major poetic and rhetorical devices intermingle freely. Finnegans Wake's nodal system of construction, which has been extensively examined by Hayman, is the foundation for such a 'diversoloquium' (the term that Vico uses to describe allegory in which he grounded etymology and poetic language).9 Joyce pursues this 'speaking otherwise than one seems to speak,'10 with the 'allergrossest transfusiasm' (FW425.15)11 — the greatest and coarsest of all transfusions and enthusiasms. The constructive process of Joyces major works literally involves a process of transfusion - permitting various sets of allegorical motifs to permeate one another. The work done on the genesis of the Wake by Groden, Hayman, Rose, and others establishes Joyce's increasing complexification of the text by such a strategy of semiotic transfusion. Hayman's analysis of the genesis of Anna Livia's letter establishes the crucial role of this self-contained Wakean metacommentary by tracing the elaboration of the letter from his reconstruction of it in the first-draft version of the Wake, where the letter was to appear midway through book I, to the version finally published, which appeared in book IV, where it is situated as the prologue to ALP's closing soliloquy, with which the Wake concludes to begin again. The opening comments in the text of the 'Mamafesta' episode (1.5) of the Wake, in which Joyce had planned to introduce this letter, changed little from the time he first drafted them in 192412 until the actual publication of the Wake in 1939. The first-draft version reconstructs the original passage, introducing the letter as: The proteiform graph is a polyexegetical piece of scripture. There was a time when naif alphabetters would have written it down the tracing of a. pure deliquescent recidivist possibly ambidexterous, snubnosed probably, and having a fully profound rainbowl in his or her occiput. [Italics are those of the editor indicating a later level of addition.]13

120

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

The only change before publication occurs when 'polyexegetical piece' is changed to 'polyhedron,' so that the first sentence becomes: 'The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture' (107.8). The archaeological and topological associations suggested by 'polyhedron' combine to produce multiplex meanings about the nature of the letter (as manuscript and book) among its various possible transmutations — a decaying photograph, the droppings in an 'orangery' or 'mudmound,' the Book ofKells, a clay tablet, a painting by Klee, jottings in a copybook, Document #2 (the infamous DeValera alternative to the Treaty), the 'makings of a verdigrease savingsbook' (412.33), a 'lost moment's gift of memento nosepaper' (457.34), and 'scribings scrawled on eggs' (615.10). Since, among other things, the letter is in one sense any manuscript and in another Joyces Wake, it is a complex assemblage of tales. It is pointed out by one of the annalists in conversation with Yawn that 'there are sordidly tales within tales, you clearly understand that?' (522.4—5), for both dreams and encyclopaedic books like the Arabian Nights or Ulysses involve multiple overlayerings and interweavings of tales. At another level, as this phrasing that echoes Ezekiel suggests (1.16: 'The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel')14 this letter, book, machine is also prophetic and apocalyptic.15 Admittedly it is a comic epiphanic apocalypse achieved through intoxicated vision - 'a bockalips of finisky fore his feet' (bockbeer made of clear water) - and through sexual or physical contact: 'apuckalips' (455.1) or 'unpackyoulloups' (526.18). Either or both mock apocalypses that are ultimately achieved on this 'night of the Apophanypes' (626.5) are presided over by the four annalists ('them four hoarsemen on their opolkaloops' [557.1]), those originary tribal elders, tellers of tales and (mis-)interpreters of apocalypses. The association with wheels when specifically linked to Shem (as Jeremy) continues to be linked to tales as well for 'Postreintroducing Jeremy, the chastenot coulter, the flowing taal that brooks no brooking runs on to say how, as it was mutualiter foretold of him by a timekiller to his spacemaker, velos am bos and arubyat knychts, with their tales within wheels and stucks between spokes' (246.36247.4). Here the reference to wheels and spokes turns the process of telling tales back into the process of a machine producing motion, for Velos ambos' is a pun that ties the Latin phrase veloces ambos (= both swift), which alludes to Swift as an Irish satirist and story-teller, with the French word for bicycle, velos. The bicycle, which was still a reasonably recent technological achievement in Joyce s day, having first been introduced in its modern form in the 1870s,16 is central to the Wakes structure, since Shaun, the political and business-like twin, appears in the dream as a postman delivering the mail by bicycle: 'A human pest cycling (pist!) and recycling (past!) about the sledgy streets, here he was (pust!) again!' (99.5-7)17 - but

Assembling and Tailoring a Modern Hermetic Techno-Cultural Allegory

121

also as a cyclist cycling back through history, for 'the Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin. Still onappealed to by the cycles and unappalled by the recoursers' (452.21-3). 'Cycloannalism,' associated with the 'god of all machineries,' operates across space and through time in writing ('phases of Scripture' [254.27]) and art ('poses of Sepulture' [254.28]), interlinking the psychological, the social, and the historical in the process of story-telling, whether in ancient mortuary architecture or as 'television opes longtimes ofter' (254.22). That this cycling trope implies tales are produced by story-building machines is further underlined by the references to communicative technologies in the above cited passage — from early runic writing ('only the ruining of the rain has heard' [99.3]), to one on telegraph, wireless, and broadcast communication ('Cracklings cricked ... Morse nuisance noised ... Aerials buzzed to coastal listeners' [99.5-7]). Just as the cycle moves or flows along a path, the flow of language (Du., taal = language) produces tales. Such tales include the Arabian Nights; the Rubaiyat; 'the taletold of Fromio and Cigalette' (563.27; i.e., La Fontaine's fable of an ant and a cicada or the story of a Romeo and a Juliet); 'a tale told of Shaun and Shem' (215.35); a tale of a tree and a rock ('telmetale of stem or stone' [216.3]); or a 'tale of a tublin' (335.27). Because of the flowing of the tale 'that brooks no brooking' (247.1), 'time is for talerman' (319.8-9) for as 'foretold' of Shem the poet 'by a timekiller to his spacemaker' the poet is 'running awage with the use of reason (sics) and ramming amok at the brake of his voice (sees)' (247.5-6). Shem, as poet and 'seeker of the nest of evil in the bosom of a good word' (189.28-9), is addressed: 'you with your dislocated reason, have acutely foretold' (189.30-1) a series of destructions and devastations such as 'death with every disaster, the dynamitisation of colleagues, the reducing of records to ashes' (189.34-6). The Shem-like tale-teller markets in imaginary 'ficts' rather than facts: ... trying to undo with his teeth the knots made by his tongue, retelling humself by the math hour, long as he's brood a reel of funnish ficts apout the shee, how faust of all and on segund thoughts and the thirds the charmhim girlalove and fourther-more and filthily with bag from Oxatown and baroccidents and proper accidence and hoptohill and hexenshoes, in fine the whole damning letter ... (288.7-13)

'The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly' - a rann composed by Hosty, who is described as a popular bar-room poet - which tells the tale of HCE or Humpty Dumpty and is stereotypical of the 'gossipaceous' tale, is Viersified and piersified may the treeth we tale of live in stoney' (44.9). 'Treeth' living in 'stoney' is the stuff of myth and legend, for while Issy may learn from gramma's grammar that 'tough troth is stronger than fortuitous fiction,' 'troth' is not precisely truth, being itself a social construe-

122 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics tion and Issy illustrates the lesson with examples from the comics (e.g., Thimble Theater with Popeye and Olive Oyl) and Gothic tales of Black Masses. If all people are 'tell-tale[rs]' (268.30) - washerwomen who tell all about Anna Livia, bartenders who tell endless 'tales of tublin' (335.28), theologians, reporters, and kings - all of them in telling these tales are dealing with 'matterfs] of fict' (532.15), creating 'fictionable worlds' (345.35) and fashionable worlds (for fashion is its own form of fiction) in the process of constructing their social world. The universality of story-telling is dramatized in relation to the tattling tale about HCE's escapades in Phoenix Park in a passage that links speaking, writing, and temporal movement: 'The movibles are scrawling in motions, marching, all of them ago, in pitpat and zingzang for every busy eerie whig's a bit of a torytale to tell. One's upon a thyme and two's behind their lettice leap and three's among the strubbely beds' (20.21-5). As the dream begins, although ALP has been 'strengly forebidden to steal our historic presents from the past postpropheticals,' she still is the story-teller since 'Gricks may rise and Troysirs fall (there being two sights for ever a picture) for in the byways of high improvidence that's what makes lifework leaving ... Let young wimman run away with the story and let young min talk smooth' (11.35-12.3). As the dream draws to its conclusion, ALP muses: 'I will tell you all sorts of makeup things, strangerous. And show you to every simple storyplace we pass' (625.5-6). During the pub scene, a delightful musical interlude filled with laughter, when Issy thinks about HCE spying on her urinating, terminates with the injunction: 'Cease, prayce, storywalkering around with gestare romanoverum he swinking about is they think and plan unrawil what' (361.32-3). (Gestare romanorum is a medieval collection of tales.) But the 'storywalkering' goes on as the host falls 'from story to story like a sagasand to lie' (374.36—375.1)Joyces strategy for composing the Wake reveals the centrality of the performance of story-telling to its structure. Beginning with the early vignettes identified by Hayman and others, Joyce grounded his work in various short plots, beginning with his adaptation of Tristan and Iseult. Each vignette contributes allegorical ingredients to the whole, and rather than focusing on a literal character - with the exception of ALP's letter - focuses on theological, historical, legendary, or mythical figures: King Roderick O'Conor, Saint Kevin, Saint Patrick and the Archdruid, Tristan and Isolde. Joyce was well aware of the Schiller-Goethe tradition that suggested there were a limited number of'dramatic situations' (schemas for plots), for in Trieste his library contained George Polti's Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, a book written at the turn of the century which explored the Schiller-Goethe speculation and outlined the schema of the thirty-six dramatic situations which Polti had managed to identify and describe. Just as Joyce tried to utilize all imaginable rhetorical devices in 'Aeolus,' or a historical catalogue of the growth of English prose in 'Oxen of the Sun,' he tried in the Wake to create an assemblage of all possible

Assembling and Tailoring a Modern Hermetic Techno-Cultural Allegory 123 dramatic situations, for the poet composing this dream poem is like a tailor sewing together a multitude of tales - 'watching her sewing a dream together, the tailor's daughter' (28.6-7). Tailoring tales blends with reporting news, for Anna Livia 'is acoming, alpilla, beltilla, ciltilla, deltilla, running with her tidings, old the news of the great big world' (194.22-4). From the beginning of the dream, Airwinger's bride' (28.16) is associated with being fascinated by the press for she 'is in her merlin chair assorted, reading her Evening World ... News, news, all the news' (28.19—21). And news blends with other media forms as well as traditional genres - films and nursery rhymes, songs and broadcasts - for in one conversation about the letter we learn: - As you sing it it's a study. That letter selfpenned to one's other, that neverperfect everplanned? - This nonday diary, this allnights newseryreel. - My dear sir! In this wireless age any owl rooster can peck up bostoons. (489.33-490.1)

But a 'nonday diary' or 'an allnights newseryreel' is also a dream - dream stories but also stories about a dream. And this plays off against the new technological media — especially film — as dream machines, for Hollywood was considered to be the dream factory.18 The machinic nature of dream and story unite in a summary statement in book IV, in which the process of the sleeper awakening has begun and 'it [the dreamer] is just about to rolywholyover' (597.3). The 'cocoincidences' (597.1) of the night have been composed of books of tales, myth, and legend like the One Thousand and One Nights, the Eddas, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead; that is, 'of all the stranger things that ever not even in the hundrund and badst pageans of unthowsent and wonst nice or in eddas and oddes bokes of tomb, dyke and hollow to be have happened!' (597.5-8). These descriptive words concerning the One Thousand and One Nights illustrate (1) a Joycean strategy of building contrary or contradictory meanings within single lexical items, and turning them into a far more concentrated and condensed polylogical play than the Popean 'zeroic couplet['s]' condensed play with the logical square; (2) the intertwining play of opposites that dominates the rest of the passage; and (3) the popular nature of their content as books of Tom (tomb), Dick (dyke), and Harry (hollow). McHugh has noted how 'badst' is both 'bad' and 'best' (Da., badst = best), while 'wonst' as opposed to 'badst' suggests 'worst' but also 'once' and winning' in the sense of the act of awakening, winning out over sleep.19 The One Thousand and One Nights could then be thought of as an unholy book whose pages are populated with pagans ('pageans') and which also presents a series of pageants,' a sense that is crucial to Joyce and his 'drama parapolylogic' (474.5). (Page, pagan, and pageant

124 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics all derive from the same Anglo-Saxon root 'pag-,' exemplifying an instance of Joyce's use of etymological archaeologies inspired by Vico.) These traditional tales and the numerous other tales that are part of the dream action become parts of a meandering tale — a becoming — that is machinic: The untireties of livesliving being the one substrance of a streamsbecoming. Totalled in toldteld and teldtold in tittletell tattle. Why? Because, graced be Gad and all giddy gadgets, in whose words were the beginnings, there are two signs to turn to, the yest and the ist, the wright side and the wronged side, feeling aslip and wauking up, so an, so farth. (597.7-12)

This linkage of the contrary action of mechanics and of hydraulics is central to the way the continuous flow of water and mechanical movement as discontinuous and differentiating contribute to the interaction between the dream entities - ALP and HCE, Shem and Shaun, Izzy and her brothers, HCE and his sons, and ALP and her daughter, Izzy. That the 'streamsliving' of telling produces the tale told as gossip, rumour - 'tittle tattle' - makes the account of the entire living of a life a 'substrance' (substance as substitution + trance) of 'streamsbecoming.' This pattern of the stream-like movement of the tale tracing life runs through many of the Wakes river motifs; for example: 'And as it rinn it dribbled like any lively purliteasy: My, my, my! Me and me! Little down dream don't I love thee!' (153.6-8), the flowing river producing some of the poems (rann = early Irish poetic forms) that contain the tales of the night of the Wake. One aspect of the rhythm of the Wakes dramatic action arises from the differentiation and reassemblage of polylogical contraries: 'yest and ist' (East and West, but also, the past - i.e., yesterday - and the present [Ger., ist]); 'the wright side and the wronged side' (right and wrong, but also the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, or Frank Lloyd Wright, constructors and builders); 'feeling aslip and wauking up' (falling asleep and waking up, but also either falling from having slipped or when sensing a slip of the tongue, decorum, etc., waking up to the error). All of which is able to take place 'graced be Gad and all giddy gadgets, in whose words were the beginnings.' 'Gad' is not only a play on God, but on a spike or other pointed tool for working or breaking rock or ore, and on 'gadding' about (roaming about restlessly), as well as on the biblical Gad, whose name meant good fortune. Gad is basically a goad, a gadfly, and also a nomadic wanderer like that 'god of all machineries' of whom if it might be said that in his words were the beginnings.' The 'grace of god,' then, becomes the 'coincidance' (49.36) of'cocoincidences' (597.1) that makes possible the 'streamsbecoming' (597.8) of this dream that is an 'allnights newseryreel' (489.35). Joyce grounds his vision firmly in the material (the electric, hyrdaulic, and the mechanistic). To rehearse the possible multiplex interplay of meanings here is not merely an

Assembling and Tailoring a Modern Hermetic Techno-Cultural Allegory 125 exercise in mental agility, but an exploration in understanding how Joyce's poetic incorporates and modifies a sceptical or deistic mode of thought and how this is integrated with key Bergsonian insights. At the heart of this process in the Wake is the oft-discussed play of opposites that Joyce inherits from neo-Platonism and hermeticism and which he primarily associates with Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa, but on which he also places a Bergsonian spin. Cusa regarded the play of opposites as a way of producing an epistemological 'zeroic' that is the only possible knowledge of the Infinite, but Joyce transforms this doctrine into 'a theory and practice of becomings of all kinds, of coexistent multiplicities.' This is the foundation on which Joyces polylogic operates, for in such verbal complexity there could literally be said to be a semiotic polyhedron demanding polyexegesis. The text then actually proceeds to demonstrate and discuss those very generic characteristics of the Wake which contribute to its polylogic and paradoxicality and produce its pure poetry ('puraputhry'): the bathos ('bathouse'), the bizarrre and the circus-like ('bazaar'), the scriptural ('alcoran') and childlike tales (Alice and the rose garden), the selfcancelling nature of the conflict of good and evil in the world of sleep and dream ('boony noughty'; bon = good + naughty and It., buona notte = goodnight) (597.14-16). Immediately following, there is a second such sequence which begins with a parody of the stock formula for opening a tale, 'One's apurr apuss a story' (597.16) - that is, 'Once upon a time' - and speaks, on the one hand, about bed, breakfast, breaking faith, sleeping, waking, and combat among equals ('about brid and breakfedes and parricombating and coushcouch') and, on the other, of souls enduring outworn beings, doings, batterings, buyings, and sellings in 'heat, contest and enmity' (597.16-18). A third sequence begins, 'Every talk has his stay' (597.18). The 'talk' that is now coming to its conclusion has been a medley of genres, a complex construction or composition of contraries and contradictories, 'all-a-dreams perhapsing' (597.19), for the Wake 'is a sot of a swigswag, systomy dystomy, which everabody you ever anywhere at all doze' (597.1920). In the inebriated suspension of disbelief in the dream, a 'doze' takes on the epistemological status of knowing this 'swigswag systomy dystomy' (cf. physiology [i.e., systolic and diastolic blood pressure] and dichotomy < teinin = to cut) for everybody knows the 'swigswag' of the 'chaosmos[s]! system and 'dissystem' through the mechanics of the flow of the 'Livesliving being['s] ... streamsbecoming' which results from the systolic and diastolic hydrodynamics of the electro-chemical nervous system pumping the flow of blood - the 'allergrossest tranfusianism' - the source of all life, dream, poems, and stories. The only ultimate response to questioning all of this: which everabody you ever anywhere at all doze. Why? Such me' (597.21-2) - as everybody anywhere knows, such I am and as to why that is so, Search me!

126 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics At the very outset of the Wake, we are warned about the nomadic nature of this 'meandertale' (18.22) and about this 'meanderthalltale' (19.25). Joyce introduces this portmanteau in a key passage that includes the specific interrelation of the 'machinic' nature of the complex allegory, the treatment of language as a multiplex code, and the nature of writing: (Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this daybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. Tieckle. They lived und laughed ant loved end left. Forsin. Thy thingdome is given to the Meades and Porsons. The meandertale, aloss and again, of our old Heidenburgh in the days when Head-in-Clouds walked the earth. 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. But with a rush out of his navel reaching the reredos of Ramasbatham. (18.17-29)

This passage, combining Eastern and Western scriptural motifs, plays with reading, writing, the nomadic composition of tales, the construction of scriptures, rhetorical and orthographical-rhetorical21 by-play, codification and typification and the contradictions and conflicts that emerge in the process, for 'the war is in words' (98.34-5). This conception of a 'meandertale' allows the dream action to establish a Viconian relation between the mechanics of communication and the mechanics of human development. The Wake wanders from biblical references on writing and reading that occur in Daniel's22 tale of the handwriting on the wall at Belshazar's Feast - 'Many ... Tieckle ... Forsin ... Thy thingdome is given to the Meades and Persons' - and in a prior allusion that occurs in Mutt's conversation with Jute (18.5) immediately preceding this passage, to references about reading in Habakkuk 2.1—2: 'he may run who readeth it.' There also is a lengthy Buddhistic passage on cyclicity, the nid&na - the twelve preconditions of origination (and hence the basis of transmigration): (1) ignorance; (2) dispositions; (3) consciousness; (4) name and form; (5) six sense fields; (6) contact; (7) feeling; (8) craving; (9) appropriation; (10) becoming (entails - ensuance - existentiality = existence); (11) birth; (12) aging and dying.23 This passage goes on to ground this reading, writing, and telling in the very roots of human technology for 'a hatch, a celt, an earshare the pourquose of which was to cassay the earthcrust at all of hours, fiirrowards, bagawards, like yoxen at the turnpaht' (18.29-31). HCE with hatchet, ploughshare, and aurality produces food for body and mind and also produces expressive artefacts which become the foundation of human conflict:

Assembling and Tailoring a Modern Hermetic Techno-Cultural Allegory

127

Here say figurines billycoose arming and mounting. Mounting and arming bellicose figurines see here. Futhorc, this liffle effingee is for a firefing called a flintforfall. Face at the eased! O I fay! Face at the waist! Ho, you fie! Upwap and dump em, mace to mace! When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit. (18.31-19.1)

That the 'meanderthalltale' (19.25) is intricately involved with technology and technologies of communication is further confirmed, for an axe can become an instrument of writing in a hieroglyphic world: 'Somedivide and sumthelot but the tally turns round the same balifuson ... Axe on thwacks on thracks, axenwise' (19.18-20). These remarks about the 'axe' immediately follow the reflections on the evolution of script and then print discussed earlier. Joyce treats tale and story as elemental building blocks for constructing poetic assemblages. The assemblage of mini-tales or mini-stories - multiple plots - disassemble the continuity, linearity, and narrativity to reassemble them in an overlayered, interacting dramatic medley of tales, for a 'meanderthalltale' not only produces a 'tall tale,' but while doing this it wanders nomadically among all tales. Such a strategy suits the world of inner consciousness and dream, transforming Sterne's associative machine through a multiplicity of semiotic and structural dimensions where the lexical play of the verbal surface is paralleled at the structural level by the 'tales within tales.' This is the basis of Joycean hermetic allegory, for it permits the allegory to become a structure built of complexes of signifiers constructed by playing with the signifying surface through a process of accretion well illustrated by the successive stages - manuscript, proof, and Work in Progress - that constitute the remaining evidence of the genesis of the Wake. At one of the most elementary levels, the allegorical structure of the Wake occurs in the overlayerings of cultural and natural objects. A phrase such as 'A tale told of Shaun or Shem?' (215.31) is immediately transformed into 'Telmetale of stem or stone' (215.35), where the twins become the elm tree and stone which are associated variously with HCE and ALP, the parents and the siblings, and then with a variety of hermetic and mythical signs. The Wakes radical paronomasia and development of portmanteaux in and of themselves establish a continuous metaphorical structure which sustains the allegory. Another elementary level that further engenders the allegorical structure is that which Bakhtin associates with the 'lower parts,' for the Wake's historical grounds are in 'the orangery,' the 'mudmound.' Since the Wake's dreamer-poet 'jest couldn't laugh through the whole of her farce,' he 'downadowns his pantoloogions and made a piece of first perpersonal puetry that staystale remains to be. Cleaned' (509.32-6). This produces 'the tail, so mastrodantic, as you tell it [which] nearly takes your own mummouth's breath away' (510.3). Pop (HCE) as the master poet, Dante, and as mastodon overpowering Mom as mammoth, triumphs because his 'troppers

128 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics are so unrelieved because his [Dante's] troopers were in difficulties' (510.4—5). Since for Joyce, as we have seen, the war is in the words,' tropes can be regarded as troopers that provide the allegory with 'puetry.' The 'topes' (i.e., topoi or topics) of today's techno-cultural poetry must be unrelieved as in the Wake, for the tropes of Dante and his age are in difficulty. So the unrelieved play of tropes ('troppers') is justified by transforming medieval aphorisms such as 'Still let stultitiam done in veino condone ineptias made of veritues' (510.5-6), since the folly ('stultitiam') and the truth to be found in inebriation - '/'« vino veritai (i.e., Veritues' that are 'in veino,' and hence in 'puetry') - embrace the ineptitudes produced by truth and virtue. For Joyce the poetry of dream is the folly and wisdom of a form of inebriation, as the surrealists and other avant-garde movements alleged. The book-letter is also a 'Ulykkhean perplex,' a four-handed (four-sided, four-levelled) codified ('debts and dishes,' i.e., dots and dashes = book of Morses) complex and ironically (but appropriate to the blurred focus of a Duff-Mugli) an Odyssey or Ulysses created either by misfortune or accident. This technologically mediated and disseminated 'tetrachiric or quadruname' perplex involves the four levels of medieval exegesis used by Dante, the four stages of Vice's cyclical theory of history in the New Science, and usually the four-term structural relationships of contradictories, contraries, and subalternates within the logical square. In Joyce's poetic, the diagonal semiotic revision of the vertical medieval four levels of meaning is crossed horizontally with a gyre- or spiral-like revision of Vico's poetic history to generate a non-hierarchical polylogue — the 'polyhedron of scripture.' As for Dante's four-part semiotic, since 'the heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities [are] transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past, type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, with sendence of sundance' (614.35-615.2), Dante's allegorical levels become four interpenetrating (criss-crossing) layers: the materio-literal (letter from litter); the allegorical rhetorico-poetical (type by tope); the ethical discourse of power and communication (word at ward); and, the body's anagogic sensual communion (sendence of sundance) by which the future comes to be through the presentness of the past. The Holy Spirit, the disseminator of the word, becomes a set of'homely codes,' the territory of the poet: 'I, poor ass, am but as their fourpart tinckler s dunkey' (405.6-7). To revisit an earlier citation, an example of Joyce's multi-layered transformation of medieval allegorical structuring, particularly one which relates the verbal action to a supra-scriptoral world such as the dream world, consider the remarks noted above about the Book of Kelts, 'What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for' (482.34-6). Here there is a conjunction of earere-air (in two senses) with eye-I-aye. Further, there is an implicit present in contrast to 'ere,' the past, thus underlining the present immediacy of the ear interpolated within an interplay of code, cord (in the sense of twine), and chord (in the

Assembling and Tailoring a Modern Hermetic Techno-Cultural Allegory

129

musical sense). This develops tensions between the literal thread of senses - ear, eye, chord; the 'allegorical' thread of time - present, past, and future; a 'sociopolitical' (Joyce's transformation of the 'moral') thread, which involves communication and control (i.e., media) - seizing from the air for the ear of the I, not the seeing eye; an abstract ('anagogical') thread of structuration - code, cord, chord - reflecting sound, sense, and the labyrinth of meaning; and a concluding final assent 'aye' for ear rather than 'eye.' The groups of puns that cluster around 'eye' and 'ear' exfoliate to embrace the materiality of the senses, the interpretive play with the topical motifs of time, means, and media of transmission, the playful analysis of meaning and control within codes, chords, coding, and decoding, and the participatory assent of the opening of the ear (and the central nervous system) to the code. The Wake considers its poet to be both an interpreter of and meta-commentator on — coder and decoder — the poetic origin of every night's dream vision. Shem is both reading and writing the works he composes, for the reading of the 'useless' and allegedly 'unreadable' Ulysses (a 'decoding') is in one sense the writing of the Wake (an 'encoding' and yet an 'intrepidation of our dreams' [338.30]) which he was 'hardset to mumorise more than a word a week' (180.29-30). In the process, the latter (the letter, the Wake) becomes a parodic meta-commentary and the plagiarism of an 'epickal forged check,' for 'who can say how many pseudostylic shamiana, how few or how many of the most venerated public impostures, how very many piously forged palimpsests slipped in the first place by this morbid process from his pelagiarist pen?' (181.36-182.2). This (parodic) 'parrotic' aspect of Shem, the 'pelagiarist' poet, who 'uttered [the letter] for Anna,' as mouthpiece for the muse, is further expounded in an earlier remark that Shem responds to any speaker who addresses him by being an inveterate 'clasp [er of] shakers,' the handshake or 'handtouch that is speech without words' for he is known to agree to 'every word as soon as half uttered' (174.10—11). Still the 'miming,' 'mimicry,' and 'mumorising' of his hermeneutic and mimetic manoeuvres generate possible futures (present-oriented probable impossibilities - the very stuff dreams are made of), for as a gloss on Kev-Shem as poet states the 'Ideal Present Alone Produces Real Future (303.LI 1-13). Such a future is also generated by the imaginary produced in night visions as we 'drames' our dreams: 'We will not say it shall not be, this passing of order and order's coming, but in the herbest country and in the country around Blath as in that city self of legionds they look for its being ever yet' (277.18-22). This describes that presentness of the future in the past - THE FUTURE PRESENTATION OF THE PAST' (272.R 5-8) - which provides the basis of Joycean and Viconian history and Joycean poetic prophecy. For history, like HCE, is the flow of blood pumped by the heart, the flow of the river to the sea, and the flow ot time: 'Tys Elvenland! Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be' (215.22-4).

10 The Rhythmatick of Our Eternal Geomater

Henri Poincar^ s comment about the evolution of our concept of numbers eerily echoes the movement of Finnegans Wake when he observes that 'though the source be obscure, still the stream flows on.' His fellow intuitionist, the hyperconservative Leopold Kronecker, playfully speculated on the source when he declared that 'God created the integers, the rest is the work of man.' In so declaring, Kronecker was articulating his rejection of the entire project of exploring infinity launched by Georg Cantor that had become a major cause of the state of crisis which pervaded mathematics in the latter days of the nineteenth and the early days of the twentieth century. Joyce's worksheet notes for Ulysses reveal his growing interest in contemporary mathematics, for they demonstrate that he had read a substantial portion, if not all, of Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, that through Russell he had become aware of Cantorian numbers and infinitesimals; and he also had become acquainted with Giusseppe Peano's three primitive ideas and five primitive propositions for reducing the theory of numbers to the smallest set of premises and undefined terms from which it could be derived.1 The same worksheets show that Joyce was somewhat familiar with nonEuclidean and n-dimensional geometries, for they contain an entry which indicates that he had at least some knowledge of the newer geometries as well as of Euclid and of Cartesian analytic geometry. That entry reads: Eucl. Space no total curvature of spine (Milly) Lobatschewsky const, tot curv. neg. Riemann " " " Pod.2

McHugh suggests that Joyce may have acquired his knowledge of non-Euclidean geometry from Poincare', who is mentioned in the Wake (e.g., 'Pointcarried' [304.5]). While a thorough investigation of Joyce and mathematics is beyond the

The Rhythmatick of Our Eternal Geomater

131

scope of this book, it is important to supplement allusions already made to arithmetic and geometry and briefly to consider the ramifications of mathematics for Joyce's treatment of engineering, the techno-scientific, the techno-cultural, and his crafting of a techno-poetics. From Russell, Joyce gained an insight into the contemporary awareness of the relationship of mathematics to logic, into the abstract nature of arithmetic, and into the conjunction of mathematics and philosophy. From Poincare, in addition to gaining some insight into non-Euclidean geometries, he could have learned much about the potential productivity of modern mathematics and its profound implications for the new mechanics, but he also would have become acquainted with the controversies between the logicians (e.g., Russell, Hilbert) and the intuitionists (e.g., Poincare, Kronecker). To further his interest in and awareness of contemporary mathematics, he was most likely familiar with how some of his contemporaries in the visual arts, notably Duchamp, were interested in Riemann s n-dimensional geometry3 - a geometry which is fundamental to the treatment of space and time in Einstein's general theory of relativity and in quantum theory. It has also been suggested that Joyce s knowledge of the 'tesseract'(100.35), a basic figure in non-Euclidean geometry, could have been discovered from reading Abbott's Flatland. Fritz Senn has written about Joyce's firsthand knowledge of and 'plurabilistic' use of Euclid - 'the aliments of jumeantry' (286.L9—10). Gauss and Richard Hamilton are both mentioned in the Wake, as well as Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and even the less well known Be"zouts.6 Clearly Joyce, while not a mathematician, had a fair knowledge of the history of classical mathematics and of the important changes that had taken place in modern mathematics beginning in the seventeenth century and culminating in the emergence of the great era of contemporary mathematics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The significant presence of mathematics in the Wake may first appear at crosspurposes to the concept of the poet as engineer constructing poetic machines, for mathematicians and machines had lived in an uneasy alliance from the beginnings of modern mathematics until after Joyce's death. While Leibniz and Pascal both built calculating machines, and while Charles Babbage and Ada, Countess of Lovelace, historically important applied mathematicians, were fascinated by prototypes of what would become the modern computer, as late as the end of the Second World War, E.T. Bell, one of the leading historians of mathematics, could be antagonistic towards the suggestion of any direct value of machines to mathematicians. Less than a decade after the war, scholars and researchers were speaking with ease about logic machines and tracing their pedigree back to the early logic machines of Ramon Lull's Ars Magna. Today in a world familiar with Turing machines, with the writings of Warren Weaver, Norbert Wiener, and Marvin Minsky, and with other

132 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics affiliations between people, logic, mathematics, and machines, there is little of the same discomfort as in 1950, but there is still an awareness that what innovative mathematicians do is a very special extension of the machinic which our computers probably will never totally replicate.7 Granting the special quality of the insight of the great mathematicians, from the earliest historically recorded moments in the development of arithmetic - such as when the quipu or later the abacus were instruments of calculation - there has been an ongoing association between the arithmetical, the mathematical, technology, and the machine. Through C.K. Ogden and LA. Richards's The Meaning of Meaning, Joyce most likely was aware that some philosophers and mathematicians in the early twentieth century spoke of mathematics both as a thinking machine and as providing a set of directions for directing some of the processes of that machine (i.e., providing programming for that superlative thinking-machine the mind).8 Joyce's interest in the machinic, the techno-scientific, and mathematics obviously led him to understand that numeracy and literacy are inextricably interlinked and to an understanding that in the twentieth century the abstract was as fundamental to communication and the arts as to science, thus providing a critique of the Hegelian-derived postColeridgean notion of the literary work as symbolic (in the Romantic movement's sense of the term) and as a 'concrete universal.' His awareness of these implications of mathematics must have had an influence, though not the sole influence, on various aspects of his activity as a poet: first, it had strong implications for his use of allegory and the consequent favouring of metonymy over metaphor; second, it has implications for his understanding of the emerging techno-culture; third, it has specific implications for his treatment of areas that intersect with his poetics, such as theories about the machinic, about time and space, about light and colour, and about the association of the poet and the engineer; fourth, it has implications about his treatment of plot and story, and their human dimensions; finally, most significant of all, the rethinking of arithmetic and geometry by modern mathematicians fitted well within the imaginary structure of a dream world. Lewis Carroll in his writings had already established how logic and mathematics could be utilized in shaping a dream world where non-sense holds sway, and even though Joyce supposedly had not read Carroll before beginning the composition of the Wake (although he did so well prior to its completion), it is not surprising that through a knowledge of Bertrand Russell, Sir Arthur Eddington, J.W.N. Sullivan,9 and others, he would also come to realize the affinity of modern mathematics and the new physics with the world of dream. Sensing that the poet as engineer in constructing his poetic machines is an applied mathematician and scientist, in II.2 (Triv and Quad') Joyce explored the bridge between II. 1 ('The Mime'), the ludic, dramatic learning of the child, and II.3 ('The Pub'), the mediated story-telling and broadcasting (gossip, rumour,

The Rhythmatick of Our Eternal Geomater

133

news, radio, TV) of adults. The interesting thing about 'Triv and Quad' - 'the muddest thick that was ever heard dump since Eggsmather got smothered in the plap of the pfan' (296.20-1) - is that it treats the evolution of the 'hieroglyphs of engined egypsians' as encompassing numeracy as well as literacy, arithmetic as well as language, mathematics as well as linguistics. In this section he thus constructs a sensorial-physiological, a philosophic, and an 'educational' relation between literacy, numeracy, and techne as the means by which people develop from childhood through adolescence to maturation. More specifically, the modern outgrowths of the seven liberal arts, the trivium and quadrivium, are seen to be a function of an all-encompassing, if rather 'ambiviolent' and 'chaosmotic,' semiotic machine. 'Eggsmather' (eggs + mother + math + matter), generating life through the mechanical event of 'the flap of a fan,' recapitulates the growth in knowledge that is the 'muddest thick' (maddest + muddiest) reflection of the contemporary transformation of those classical liberal arts (and sciences). Joyce naturally treats the mathematical world of such things as common denominators, as a 'comedy nominator' (283.7), for the episode immediately preceding 'Triv and Quad' ends with the invocation 'Loud heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low' (259.7—8). In harmony with the tactics of, but much more complex than, Lewis Carroll's writings, Joyce's Wake continues that 'mathematical doodling' which Herring has identified Joyce pursuing in the 'Ithaca' episode of Ulysses. It must be noted that Joyce's use of algebra, arithmetic, and geometry, which is 'analytical plausible' (299.27-8), will be 'a lozenge to me all my lauffe' (299.28-9 [lozenge = lesson; lauffe = laugh + life), because a blending of comedy and logic is the key to his treatment of the 'Doodles family' (299.F4). The intellectual as mathematician can be described as 'laying him long on his laughside' (301.28).10 As Deleuze demonstrates in his Logic of Sense, in the machinic universe there is a fantastic sense embedded in its nonsense, and so Joyce plays with and on arithmetic, geometry, and other aspects of mathematics while simultaneously describing the mechanics and dynamics of his book and its world. The key to this mathematico-scientific extension of the technical in the Wake is first stated in Joyce's remarks about the penultimate and the concluding episodes of Ulysses. Regarding the 'Ithaca' episode, he wrote to Budgen in 1921 saying: 'I am writing Ithaca in the form of a mathematical catechism. All events are resolved into their cosmic, physical, psychical equivalents ... so that the reader will know everything and know it in the baldest and coldest way.'11 That mathematical catechism embraced the whole domain of science and mechanics for, as Joyce told Claude Sykes, he was 'struggling with the acidities of Ithaca - a mathematico-astronomicophysico-mechanico-geometrico-chemico sublimation of Bloom and Stephen (devil take 'em both) to prepare for the amplitudinously curvilinear episode Penelope.'12 As noted earlier, 'the last word (human all too human) is left to Penelope. This is

134 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics the indispensable countersign to Bloom's passport to eternity.'13 This remark clearly underlines the cosmological nature of Bloom-Ulysses' encounter with Molly-Penelope. So the concluding episode presents Molly-Penelope as the globe moving through the solar system and its galaxy while she weaves a web of sense. This 'earthball' has 'four cardinal points ... the female breasts, arse, womb and sex.'1 The union of Bloom and Molly, like the encounter of Bloom and Stephen, is an encounter of galactic bodies, an encounter of mathematical, physical, and geographic abstractions, and an encounter of two machinic systems. This pattern is carried forth into the Wake, where, as we have seen, ALP and HCE are river and tree/mountain, the cardiovascular and neuromuscular systems, and hydraulic energy and electro-mechanical energy. Just as with Ulysses, the Wake uses the abstractness of the mathematico-scientific to explore the desire andjouissance of the everyday world, especially the erotic encounter. For even if 'the herewaker of our hamefame is his real namesame who will get himself up and erect, confident and heroic' as he is wooing a wee one,' his 'Alma Luvia Polabella' (619.12-16), because HCE and ALP are also 'sigla' (32.14), they can also be 'the heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past' (614.35-615.1). These wedded sigla can even become elements of geometric abstractions. First, of HCE: 'Show that the median, hce che ech, interecting at royde angles the parilegs of a given obtuse one biscuts both the arcs that are in curveachord behind. The family umbroglia' (283.32-284.4). Then, of ALP (293.diagram):

This geometry descriptive of HCE and ALP is 'factionable' (285.26; fiction + faction + factor), imaginary, and satiric. The use of initials is particularly appropriate to the mathematico-scientific aspect of the Wake as cosmology. The initials HCE can be regarded as being composed of three of the primitive constants of physics: h, Planck's constant, a fundamental element in quantum mechanics; c, the velocity of light; and e, the charge of an electron. This would certainly associate Here Comes Everybody with light, energy, and electromagnetism. The initials ALP in their Greek form a\ir can be

The Rhythmatick of Our Eternal Geomater

135

regarded as being composed of two basic mathematical symbols and another primitive constant of physics (or as two aspects of physics and a fundamental mathematical symbol associated with spherical space as well as the circle): a, as a type of cosmic radiation, a symbol for the initiating point of a line or the initiating angle of a triangle, or the first number in a Cantorian infinite series; A, the cosmical constant; and TT, the ratio of the circumference of any circle to its diameter. This would appear to associate Anna Livia Plurabelle with the circle, the triangle, the spherical space of the expanding universe, and infinity. Physico-mathematically, then, as well as physiologically, HCE's discontinuous 'electrickery' counterpoints, yet complements, ALP's cosmic and 'geomat[rical]' motion. And it is our 'paradismic perimutter' who 'expenses herself as sphere as possible' (298.28) in the 'expending' universe, for, as Eddington explains, Hubble in producing his theory of the expanding universe has to use non-Euclidean spherical geometry: Space will dien be spherical; that is to say it will be like the surface of a sphere, only with one more dimension which you must imagine as best you can. More technically it is like the three-dimensional surface or boundary of a hypersphere in four dimensions. If I say it is like the surface of a hypersphere - that we can make the simplest map of space by drawing it on a hypersphere -1 do not say it is the surface of a hypersphere, for the hypersphere is only the scaffolding of the map. 5

This is certainly a way of being as 'sphere as possible.' But our earth itself is also only as 'sphere as possible,' for it is not spherical, but ellipsoidal as the mathematician Gauss (who is mentioned in the Wake [531.19])16 established in his geodesical studies around 1818.17 But what else would one expect in a universe that is 'on excellent inkbottle authority, solarsystemised, seriolcosmically, in a more and more almightily expanding universe under one, there is rhymeless reason to believe, original sun' (263. 23—7)? Geometry and geodesies are obvious components of a book that maps the macrocosm and the microcosm, for the Wake is 'the mappamund [of the world that] had been changing pattern' (253.5) as well as 'the map of the souls' groupography' (476.33). When geographical and geodesic linkages are made to HCE - 'he's as globeful as a gasometer of lithium and luridity and he was thrice ten anular years before he wallowed round Raggiant Circos' (131.35-6) - they are embedded between and within mathematical ones. For of HCE it is said, he is 'a simultaneous equator of elimbinated integras when three upon one is by inspection improper' (131.31-3), and he also has 'the most conical hodpiece of confusianist heronim' (131.33-4). This description of HCE employs references to calculus - simultaneous equations, eliminated integrals - and to the conical sections of analytical geometry.

136 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics This pattern can be condensed elliptically in the description of a dream element, such as Jaun at the opening of III.2, where we are told: He was there, you could planemetrically see, when I took a closer look at him, that was to say, (gracious helpings, at this rate of growing our cotted child of yestereve will soon fill space and burst in systems, so speeds the instant!) amply altered for the brighter, though still the graven image of his squarer self as he was used to be ... (429.9-14)

As the next chapters will demonstrate, relating electricity and light ('amply altered for the brighter') with geometry and space, speed and system, weaves together the mathematical (particularly the geometric and calculus - 'rate of growing') and the physics of space, time, electromagnetism, and light. This play with analysis and geometry, as Magaret Solomon demonstrated,18 is comic and sexual, for as one of Issy s notes suggests, 'My globe goes gaddy at geography giggle pending which time I was looking for my shoe all through Arabia' (275.F2). Such comic global geography appears again and again in passages throughout the Wake. HCE-Yawn, for example, comments about his wife in global, geographic, and mathematical terms: ... I popo possess the ripest littlums wifukie around the globelettes globes upon which she was romping off on Floss Mundai out of haram's way round Skinner's circusalley first with her consolation prizeJn my serial dreams of faire women, Mannequins Passe, with awards in figure and smile subsections, handicapped by two breasts in operatops, a remarkable litde endowment garment. (532.30—5)

Such a passage about the human figure and 'serial dreams' hints at connections with the esoteric, the oneiric, numbers, and figures. Global geometry is again commented upon by Professor Jones in his diatribe against the contemporary concept of a space-time continuum when he asserts in a critique of one Professor Loewy-Brueller that ... looking through at these accidents with the faroscope of television, (this nighdife instrument needs still some subtractional betterment in the readjustment of the more refrangible angles to the squeals of his hypothesis on the outer tin sides), I can easily believe heartily in my own most spacious immensity as my ownhouse and microbemost cosm when I am reassured by ratio that the cube of my volumes is to the surfaces of their subjects as the sphericity of these globes... is to the feracity of Fairynellys vacuum. (150.31-151.7)

Here the comic geometrical vision seems to be both pan-global and super-global. Joyce plays with the Pythagorean theorem, with the spherical geometry of the globe, with the formula for the volume of a sphere, which is a cubic measure of vol-

The Rhythmatick of Our Eternal Geomater

137

ume (i.e., 4/3^^), and probably with the concept of a hypersphere,19 for the entire passage, with its reference to TV and the vacuum tube that enables the projection through broadcasting of a singers (the ferocity and veracity of Farinelli's) voice across space, toys with the escape of some of the radio waves into space. Such Joycean mathematics is as ambivalent as the Wakean language, for it is satirizing both the speaker's failure to understand the relation of time and space and the ambivalence of contemporary mathematics itself. Joycean mathematics, then, is related to the machinic, for it is not only playing with cosmic mechanics, but with high-technology communicating machines - 'the faroscope of television' — which only becomes possible through the application of branches of mathematics to science and engineering. When Issy finally grasps the geometrico-sexual construction of ALP - 'the maidspron of our A.L.P. ... till its nether nadir is vertically where ... its naval's napex wil have to beandbe (297.11— 14) — she is told, 'You must proach near mear for at it is dark. Lob. And light your mech. Jeldy!' (297.14-15), which is glossed in the footnotes as 'Ugol egal ogle. Mi vidim Mi' (297.F2; Angle, equal, oggle. We see me). 'Mech' underlines the relation of machines and mathematics, for Greek, mekhne, is a form of the Indo-European root magh-, from which 'mechanical' is derived and which is also associated with the meaning of power or force. The lighting of the 'mech' (match), a mechanical and empowering act, is essential to grasp the geometrical and sexual implications of the 'usquiluteral threeingles' (297.27), the 'muddy old triagonal delta' (297.24), and 'the constant of fluxion' (297.29). Joycean wit associates the mechanism of the river's flow, the flowing movement of sexual intercourse, and the continuities implied in the geometrical construction. This is a world where the three children must learn 'Wonderlawn's lost us for ever. Alis, alas, she broke the glass' (270.20-1). While reminding the reader of Issy's looking-glass, this is a reference to the real Alice, Alice Liddell, which is a further reminder that the Alice books are the work of Charles Dodgson, mathematician, author, and logical game-player, for 'Liddell lokker through the leafery, our is mistery of pain' (Du., Lokker = temptress; Fr., pain = Eucharist [bread]). Carroll's (Dodgson's) Alice books and other works not only probe the unconscious, but involve mathematics and symbolic logic, for the loss of 'Wonderlawn' comes about through contemporary science and technology as much as through our selfreflection on our inner selves. This is immediately followed by a passage in which Joyce links the machinic and biologic with the mathematical: 'You may spin on youthlit s bike and multiplease your Mike and Nike with your kickshoes on the algebrars but, volve the virgil page and view, the O of woman is long when burly those two muters sequent her so from Nebob' (270.21-8). Associating the bicycle and cycling with geometry (Euclid), algebra, and multiplication reiterates the connection between mathematics and machinery, which is further extended to include

138 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics divination, randomness, and literature through allusions to the Sortes Virgilianae and to music, which is based in 'rhythmetic' (431.34; i.e., Moore's 'Take Back the Virgin Page'). This interweaving of the mathematical, the mechanical, the musical, and the randomness of divination locates mathematics as part of the foundation of poetics. (As an aside it is interesting to note that 'Nebob' refers both to nabob, a wealthy man, and to Nebo, a Babylonian god of wisdom, son of the sun god, who was supposed to have introduced writing - presumably linking arithmetic, economic investment, and the seduction of the innocents, which Issy points out in a footnote which makes Nebob 'my all menkind of every desception' [270.F4].) For Joyce's techno-poetics, the crisis in contemporary mathematics (mathematics was one of the seven liberal arts that constitute the quadrivium, which is a major interest of the 'Triv and Quad' chapter [II.2]) provides a prime focus for chaotic processes. In II.2 Joyce frequently alludes directly to the then recently revealed problems underlying the foundations of mathematics. In the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century, subsequent to Cantor's work on infinitesimals, crises regarding the axiomatic method had become a major theoretic issue in mathematics: 'Binomeans to be comprendered. Inexcessible as thy by god ways. The aximones. And their prostalutes. For his neuralgiabrown. Equal to = aosch' (285.27-286.2). Here the deductive process by which a mathematical system (such as Euclidean geometry) is deduced from axioms and postulates results in a 'neuralgic' algebra equivalent to chaos (McHugh [Annotations, 286] indicates 'aosch' is an anagram for chaos). The genesis of this passage through the various manuscript versions confirms that it concludes the section of II.2 examined in an earlier chapter which begins with the 'zeroic couplet' and 'noughty times °°' (284.10-11), the latter being the basis of a 'chaosmos' in which there are infinities of infinities. This key text also plays with finding 'if you are not literally cooefficient, how minney combinaisies and permutandies can be played on the international surd! pthwndxrcrlzp!' (284.11-14). Calculating the permutations, which is 12! (factorial 12), ... MPM brings us a rainborne pamtomomiom, aqualavant to (cat my dogs, if I baint dingbushed like everything!) kaksitoista volts yksitoista volts kyrnmenen volts yhdeksan volts kahdeksan volts seitseman volts kuusi volts viisi volts nelja volts kolme volts kaksi volts yksi! allahthallacamellated, caravan series to the finish of helve's fractures.5 In outher wards, one from five, two to fives ones, one from fives two millamills with a mill and a half a mill and twos twos fives fives of bully clavers. For a surview over all the factionables see Iris in the Evenines World.6 Binomeans to be comprendered. Inexcessible as thy by god ways. The aximones. And their prostalutes. For his neuralgiabrown. Equal to = aosch. (285.15-286.1)

The Rhythmatick of Our Eternal Geomater

139

The calculation of 12! (factorial 12 = l x 2 x 3 . . . x l 2 ) i s recapitulated in a set of basic arithmetical calculations which produce the same result and where a play on Volt' links the calculation to measurable electro-mechanical 'electrickery.'21 The whole exercise, therefore, cannot be 'comprendered' (rendered by computation + comprehended) for god's ways as the ways of the inifinite are 'inexcessible' (go beyond excess + not being accessible or fathomable). The same would appear to be the case with the axioms and postulates of geometry or algebra, whether those of Euclid or of Peano. Peano's axioms of arithmetic were based on three primitive ideas: zero, number, and successor (0, n, n + 1). These are the three primitive ideas which he assumed in articulating his five primitive propositions: (1) 0 is a number. (2) The successor of any number is a number. (3) No two numbers have the same successor. (4) 0 is not the successor of any number. (5) Any property which belongs to 0, and also to the successor of every number which has the property, belongs to all numbers. 2

Joyce plays with zero and numbers as the twins learn the 'manual arith' (282.7). They move from a fascination with the 'curdinaT numbers, associated with princes of the Church who are 'his null four lovedroyd curdinals' (282.19-20; note that later there is a reference to the ordinal numbers), to counting ('caiuscounting' [282.29] on 'the scale of pin puff pive piff, piff puff, pive poo, ... [and so on]' [282.30-2], and then to the laws of associativity (addition - 'to sum' [283.3]) and commutativity (multiplication - 'mumtlplay' [283.5]). Joyce places this exercise involving Peano's axioms within a play on induction and divinity: 'DIVINITY NOT DEITY THE UNCERTAINTY JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE. EXAMPLES' (282.R7-14). The mathematical is directly associated with a 'god of all machines' for as the four old men, the 'annalists,' eye Iseult through binoculars ('eysolt of binnoculises' [394.30]), we are told that: ... memostinmust egotum sabcunsciously senses upers the deprofundity of multimathematical immaterialities wherebejubers in the pancosmic urge the allimmanence of that which Itself is Itself Alone ... exteriorises on this ourherenow plane in disunited solod, likeward and gushious bodies with (science, say!) perilwhitened passionpanting pugnoplangent intuitions of reunited selfdom (murky whey, abstrew adim!) in the higherdimissional selfless Allself... (394.30-395.2)

This association of 'multimathematical immaterialities' (the abstractions of meta-

140 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics levels of mathematics) with problems of consciousness, depth, and self-reflexivity counterpointed against the materiality of solids, liquids and gases - 'solod, likeward and gushious bodies' - cuts to the heart of their infinite regressiveness, their paradoxicality, or the accompanying construction of a chaosmos. Yet in this world of 'deprofundity' (note that this also refers to Wildes De Profundis) through the 'allimmanence' (the all immanence + a luminancy), the inferiority of mathematical abstraction is projected on 'ourherenow plane' to be interiorized 'by science say' in the higher-dimensional selfless Allself that is central to the nature of people and to the nature of machines. Joyce plays with the ambivalence between the physical, the bodily, and mental abstraction in the foundations of mathematics. If 'in the beginning was the gest,' arithmetic is based in the finger, rhythm, and movement — 'And my waiting twenty classbirds, sitting on their stiles! Let me finger their eurhythmytic. And you'll see if I'm selfthought' (147.7-9). Music, poetry, dance, and arithmetic have in the Joycean world a natural affinity, where dance readily produces the geometrical rhomboid and trapezoidal figures of the rhumba and the maze dances. In the earlier discussion of Peano's axioms, Izzy's footnote to the example of counting 'the scale of pin puff pive pifF ties arithmetic to the dance: 'That's his whisper waltz I like from Pigott's with the Lancydancy step. Stop' (282.F4). The dance has already played a major role in the preceding episode (II. 1), in which the children jig, rumba, trot, and waltz; for example, where dance is associated with ALP, the 'geomater' - 'his dithering dathering waltzers of (245.22). Like the children, 'many a mismy cloudy has tripped taintily along that hercourt strayed reelway and the rigadoons have held ragtimed revels' (236.22-3). The episode moves towards a conclusion discussed earlier where they pleat 'a pattern Gran Geamatron showed them' (257.4—5). But it is a pattern that is associated with a bodily machine pumping the blood 'when a man' (309.5) and with the man's being a 'harmonic condenser enginium,' which rapidly leads back to the abstractions of engineering. The telling of tales is directly associated with arithmetic as well, for Shem-Dolph is 'retelling humself by the math hour ... how faust of all and on segund thoughts ... fourthermore and filthily ... ' (288.8-11) and counting 'upon his ten ordinailed ungles' (288.6; ordinal number + nail [L., ungula = nail]), finger-counting rather than the abstract arithmetic of the cardinal numbers. Joyce is demonstrating the evolution of number and letter from ordinal number and rune to variables, inifinitesimals, and imaginaries and to signs and symbols. The schoolroom episode, therefore, again emphasizes the importance of the 'bit,' for the Joycean concept of 'bit' is reiterated in a footnote at the beginning of II.2 - 'Huntler and Pumar s alphabites, the first in the world from aab to zoo' (263.F1) - reasserting the bit and bite (eating) motif. This is part of a recurrent play on bits, fragments, or traces in the triv and quad - 'Whoan, tug, trace' (272.20) - which leads up to the penulti-

The Rhythmatick of Our Eternal Geomater

141

mate assertion of the episode, already discussed in relation to bit and bite, that we've had our day at triv and quad and writ our bit as intermidgets' (306.12-13). The studies of the twins - 'mugs and grubs' (Mookse and Gripes, but also eat and drink or study hard)2 - are a form of consumption and hence of eating and digest ing (L, Manducabimus, we have chewed), so that of all of the studies from grammar to mathematics they can say, 'We writ our bit as intermidgets.' The concept of bit, iota, jot, molecule, particle, fragment, or trace is at the basis of the mechanics of the universe and of the embodied person. Joyce appears to return mathemata to its original sense of a learning, a learning about things we already know, but a learning that leads to the understanding of the abstract, so that the two parts of the liberal arts coalesce. In so doing, while stressing the abstract and while decentring the subject through use of sigla, he preserves the passion, the desire, the jouissance, by grounding the abstractions in their embodiment in tale and dance. This strategy opens up the new culture of time, space, science, and technology to the poetic. Mathematicians such as Russell and Poincare' were just as essential to Joyce in this project as scientists such as Eddington. Along with other reading that acquainted him with modern mathematics, we have seen that Joyce read most of Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy with a particular interest in the chapter on the theory of types. He apparently intuited the dilemma that Godel was to expose in 1931 — the ultimate unproveability and therefore ambivalence of fundamental axioms. While he used the formality of mathematical logic in the construction of relationships between sigla, he also realized the ambivalence and potential paradoxicality of the materials with which he was playing. 'Hearasay in paradox lust,' the marginalia declares, as 'the emerald canticle of Hermes' tells us 'on excellent inkbottle authority' that 'the tasks above are as the flasks below' for they are 'solarsystemised, seriolcosmically, in a more and more almightily expanding universe' (263.21-7). He apparently further sensed the problems of 'strange loops' and the infinite regression of classes, hence also the concept of 'meta-'levels. He, therefore, is satirizing Russell and others as much as using them, while weaving the complex web of interaction between the linguistic and the numeric.

11 The New Techno-Culture of Space-Time

Sigfried Giedion's discussions of space-time and mechanization provide an insight into the importance at the turn of the century of the new sense of space and time resulting from the impact of the new theories in contemporary mathematics, physics, and philosophy - 'The Culture of Time and Space,' as Stephen Kern has called it.1 Giedion explains that concurrent with mathematician Herman Minkowski's 1908 paper, which declared, 'Henceforth space alone or time alone is doomed to fade to a mere shadow; only a kind of union of both will preserve their existence,' artists and writers of Apollinaire s generation became concerned with the same problem.2 Giedion actually confirmed the importance during the first two decades of the twentieth century of the emerging recognition by poets and critics of the interrelation between time, space, speed, and movement - a process that he later was to tie to electro-mechanization and electrification. These observations by Joyce s close friend, though published after his death, are one important guide in understanding his techno-poetics. Wyndham Lewis, a friend and supporter of Joyce until the publication of Ulysses, became the critic who most sharply attacked Joyce for his role as a key exemplar of the new time philosophers. Lewis was well in advance of most other interpreters of Joyce in recognizing the central importance of the space-time concept in Joyce's writing. Lewis's various critiques of Joyce have frequently been problematic because of his obvious attraction to fascism and his approval of Hitler in the early 1930s, even though he subsequently rejected Nazism. In spite of this, Lewis is certainly one of the British writers, if not the prime one, with the greatest awareness and knowledge of avantgarde movements early in the twentieth century. While his attacks on Joyce and Joyce's counter-attacks might be written off as an emotional rivalry between literary antagonists, Lewis's critique and Joyce s response are significant for understanding Joyce's techno-poetics. While it has sometimes been maintained that this interchange was primarily personal and lacked any significant intellectual content,

The New Techno-Culture of Space-Time

143

Kenner3 and more particularly McLuhan noted early in the 1950s that it is quite illuminating with respect to Joyces poetic treatment of space, time, and particularity (i.e., hecceity or the epiphanic). Lewis originally attacked Joyce's Ulysses in his Art of Being Ruled, but the main thrust of his criticisms of Ulysses appeared in an article in his periodical, The Enemy, which later was included in Time and Western Man. In response to Joyces counter-attacks on him in fragments of Work in Progress published in transition, Lewis directly satirized Joyce in Childermass? Lewis, one of the earliest analysts of everyday life in his polemic works such as Time and Western Man — a primary inspiration for Marshall McLuhan, as evidenced in his earliest book, The Mechanical Bride - develops the argument that Time is the enemy of modern man by examining the entire spectrum of culture from its popular manifestations to the fine arts. The main thrust of Lewis's criticism was developed in Time and Western Man, where he included Joyce with Stein, Hemingway, and other modernists as examples of the deleterious, all-pervasive influence of the new 'time philosophies' - those of Bergson, Einstein, Minkowski, Whitehead, and others. He complained about the loss of a sense of place in a worldview that emphasized temporal flux and 'inner time.' Lewis extended his analysis to the spectrum of cultural production of his day from James Joyce and the Diaghilev ballet to Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Cops, best-sellers such as Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and contemporary fashion, such as the shortening of skirts. Contemporary criticism has argued that Lewis's critique of Bergson was motivated by his belief that these time philosophers and the experience of time that they produced are aspects of the general process of fragmentation in the twentieth century. The effect is to divide time into two distinct and incompatible domains: the instrumentality of clock time and time as actually experienced subjectively by individuals in their private everyday life.6 The way the quantification of instrumental time is objectified by this division can then be associated with the now cliche statement about the capitalist equation of time and money, thus linking Lewis's ultra-conservative critique to his being the prime exemplar of the implicit fascism in mainline modernism. Whether one accepts such an analysis in full, when it explains how Lewis interrelates the major ideological conceptions of capitalism and the theories of the time philosophers, it succinctly identifies a major aspect of Lewis's polemic writings. Lewis argues that this fascination with time and dynamic movement dislocates or disembodies space, bringing about a loss of the sense of place. The Wake, even more than Ulysses, completely breaks ranks with Lewis's vorticism since neither space nor time exists in a dream as it does in the daytime, even though we can speak of a 'dreamspace' and a 'dreamtime.' It is precisely this sense of loss of place that has been associated with the impact of electro-technological media that caused

144 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics Lewis to attack Joyce and other modernist literary practitioners, since he feared such modernists' dissolution of rational communication. This loss of a sense of place transforms social communication by creating disembedding mechanisms that distance institutions physically and temporally from the actual geographic situations within which they exercise hegemony. Such disembedding had already been explored in Ulysses in relation to colonialism, internationalization, and the press. Since a Utopia, an 'imaginary nowhere,' is the prophecy of modernity, the Wake explores the ultimate virtual reality, the world of dreams where, as Bishop has so exhaustively shown, the night world is the ideal 'nowhere' - a Utopia - 'Tisn't only tonight you're anacheronistic! It was ages behind that when nullahs were nowhere' (202.35-6). When, following the publication of Lewis's major polemics, Joyce satirizes Lewis at length in Finnegans Wake, he does so by casting him in the role of a pedantic university lecturer, Professor Jones. Jones, an 'eminent spatialist' (149.18-19) who 'believe[s] heartily' in his 'own most spacious immensity' (150.36), begins his lecture with a negative evaluation of the new time philosophies — 'the sophology of Bitchson' (149.20; i.e., the philosophy of Bergson), and the whoo-whoo and where's hair theories of Winestain' (149.28; Einstein's special theory of relativity). While Einstein's relativity theory criticized Newtonian physics, Bergson developed his concepts of motion and mental time in order to attack the intellect's tendency to 'spatialize' events and experience. In Joyce's satiric treatment of Lewis in episode 1.6 of the Wake, Professor Jones, like Lewis, associates Bergson s theories with the value system of the emerging techno-culture. He argues that such 'sophology' is the result of the 'dime-cash problem' (149.17) for, as he ultimately concludes, since 'dime [i.e., time] is cash' (161.6), therefore Bergson s time philosophy while driven as under by a purely dime-dime urge is not without cashcash characktericksticks' (149.21-2). This capitalist bourgeois time-is-money philosophy is openly spoofed later in passages linking it to advertising, mass journalism, and cliche proverbs such as 'Peg the pound to torn the devil. My time is on draught. Bottle your own. Love my label like myself. Earn before eating. Drudge after drink. Credit tomorrow' (579.17-19). The profound impact of the new culture of space-time on the Joycean universe is comically illustrated by the way the stock fairy-tale formula with which the first page of A Portrait opens - 'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow ...' - appears in the Wake, introducing a transformation of Aesop's fable of the fox and the grapes into a fable about a Mookse and a Gripes, which begins, 'Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned a Mookse' (152.1819). This parodic rephrasing also provides a clue to one aspect of Joyce's treatment of space and time as intertwined and interdependent - as space-time - and it underlines this by playing on Einstein's name. Joyce, who identifies ALP with the

The New Techno-Culture of Space-Time

145

River Liffey and her spouse, HCE with the Hill of Howth, also presents his two major dream characters as 'Father Times and Mother Spades' (600.3), but with the further byplay that ALP as river-wife can 'meander by that marritime way' (209.5), for if the river's flow is the flow of time, that time is measured by the space through which the river flows - 'the space of the time being' (109.22). The very sex-play between ALP and HCE — the 'fin,' 'our human conge eel' — in the river is a play of space with time: — He missed her mouth and stood into Dee, Romunculus Remus, plying the rape, so as now any bompriss's bound to get up her if he pool her leg and bunk on her butt. No, he skid like a skate and berthed on her byrnie and never a fear but they'll land him yet, slitheryscales on liffeybank, times and times and halve a time with a pillow of sand to polster him. (525.33— 526.2)

Elsewhere the Wake extends the exploration of this space-time relationship, highlighting how social time is that 'purely technical thing, born of mechanical development. This theme emerges in statements like: 'Having reprimed his repeater and resiteroomed his timespiece His Revenances, with still a life or two to spare for the space of his occupancy of a world at a time, rose to his feet' (56.6-8); or 'Why, bless me swits, here he its, darling Dave, like the catoninelives just in time as if he fell out of space' (462.30-1). Emphasizing this purely technical thing, Joyce quips about time and work with a query about the time-motion-study world of Frederick Winslow Taylor (whose name conveniently merges with that of the Renaissance neo-Platonist Edward Taylor): 'how comes ever a body in our taylorised world to selve out thishis' (356.10-11), supplemented by a multiplicity of references to tailors and tailoring that include occasional references to technical planning of time and motion. In his two major works, Joyce certainly recognized the two types of time that can be identified in Lewis's analysis: the quantified instrumentalized clock time and the inner time of lived experience. But the space-time perplex which Joyce discerned and Lewis feared needs to be set forth in its full multiplex complexity to grasp its relevance to contemporary cultural theory, for Joyce can range from a cosmologically, historically, and psychologically situtated spado-temporality such as represented in the passage cited earlier - 'and we are recurrently meeting em ... in cycloannalism, from space to space, time after time' (254.25-7) - to the particularity of'Spell me the chimes. They are tales all tolled. Today is well thine but where s may tomorrow be' (275.24-5). Or he can move from the brevity of 'teasetime' (191.28) to the sensuously perceived time in: 'Thyme, that chef of seasoners, has made his usual astewte use of endadjustables and whatnot willbe isnor was' (236.27-8). Furthermore, he sees space-time together with 'electrickery' (579.6) as

146 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics the great transformation that produces the harlequinade of 'Mark Time's Finist Joke. Putting Allspace in a Notshall' (455.29), which necessitates a transformation of the language into Wakese and collapses the globe into a provincial Irish metropolis. Joycean space-time dramatizes the contemporary reductive relativization of space and time, for electro-mechanization increases speed and achieves near simultaneity and instantaneity, as we have seen in exploring how TV produces a 'heliotropical noughttime' (349.6). The dream world in the Wake provides him with the closest fictive simulation of the virtual and simulated worlds that were already in 1920 the future preterite of electrification. While Joyce's theories of memory, history, and intra-personal time all rise out of this post-electric condition, let us first turn to a passage which includes an allusion to the future preterite - one of a small number of key self-reflexive passages about the book - in order to examine the relation between Joycean spatio-temporality and space-time in the dream world. The complex relationship between space-time, the senses, and modes of communication becomes clear here in a question posed by Shem to Shaun, a question the answer to which is an imaginary dream instrument and dream 1 — a 'collideorscape' (143.28; kaleidoscope + collide + -scape). That question begins: Now, to be on anew and basking again in the panaroma of all flores of speech, if a human being duly fatigued by his dayety in the sooty, having plenxty off time on his gouty hands and vacants of space at his sleepish feet and as hapless behind the dreams of accuracy as any camelot prince of dinmurk, were at this auctual futule preteriting unstant, in the states of suspensive examination, accorded, throughout the eye of a noodle, with an earsighted view of old hopeinhaven with all the ingredient and egregiunt whights and ways to which in the curse of his persistence the course of his tory will had been having recourses ... (143.3—10)

Such a passage begins with the play on the differences between physical space and dream space, for it is an imaginary panorama in which the 'flowers of speech,' the rhetorical elements of fictive, poetic reality, reign in a state where time and space are absorbed into the 'dinmurk' of the dream. This is a world which is that of the futile, future preterite - a problematic or questionable tense in English (in Latin it is identical with the future perfect) which, according to Henry Sweet, regards an occurrence as impending in the past instead of the present... (I should see, he would see).'8 The submerged oxymoron in the 'auctual futule preteriting unstant' invokes the sense of simulation or virtuality, which is the antonym of the 'actual,' partly since a future preterite cannot describe an actual instant of time, yet it can and does create a virtual instant in suspended animation and in suspenseful examination. Dream is an 'earsighted view' encompassing a spatiality of people ('whights') and paths and places (ways) through the mind's eye (the 'eye of a noodle'). Yet it also

The New Techno-Culture of Space-Time

147

anticipates modernity's wake (itself a future preterite), for it is a virtual simulation of a world where the ear and eye interplay in the perception of space-time, while replaying (i.e., recoursing) the course of history and the dreamers story. This can be clearly linked to Joyce's analyses of communication theory and of specific modes of communication which have been appropriated by McLuhan, Eco, and Derrida as well as by Deleuze in his books on cinema and on Proust.9 Take film, for instance, which Joyce speaks about as 'a pinch in time of the ideal' where we 'roll away the reel world '(64.22, 25-8). A detailed description of an assemblage of fragments which constitutes an exemplum of what Deleuze, associating it with postwar cinema, calls the time-image (or a filmic example of the simultaneity of spatial form)10 appears in a complex night-world re-creation of a hallucinatory projection in which the action of a copulating couple reflected on a window shade is envisioned as a filming of that event: Scene and property plot. Stagemanager's prompt. Interior of dwelling on outskirts of city. Groove two. Chamber scene. Boxed. Ordinary bedroom set... A time. Act: dumbshow. Closeup. Leads. Man with nightcap, in bed, fore. Woman, with curlpins, hind. Discovered. Side point of view. First position of harmony. Say! Eh? Ha! Check action. Matt. Male partly masking female... Closeup. Play! Callboy. Cry off. Tabler. Her move. Footage. (558.35-559.31)

This spatial assemblage is specfically associated with the temporal, since it is a composition through which the multiplicity of objects in space produce a temporal action before it is formally realized in the rolling of the footage, which suggests that Joyce had an understanding of the implications of the new role of montage in relation to space-time and the time-image slightly before or somewhat simultaneous with their being realized by Orson Welles (1939) and postwar French cinema. Elsewhere Dublin is described as 'a phantom city faked of philim pholk' (264.19), with the 'ph-' providing such phono-aesthetic associations as G.B. Shaw's reflections on English spelling or the associations of film with 'philo-' (either love-ins or philosophy),11 followed by a lengthy description - a spatial vista — of the city, concluding with: ... the wren his nest is niedelig as the turrises of the sabines are televisible. Here are the cottage and the bungalow for the cobbeler and the brandnewburgher:2 but Izolde, her chaplet gardens, an litlee plads af liefest pose, arride the winnerful wonders off, the winnerful

148 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics wonnerful wanders off,3 with hedges of ivy and hollywood and bower of mistletoe ... (265.10—17; superscripts are Joyce's)

This televisible pastoral setting links the Hollywood dream world with that of TV. The dream factory imagery of rolling away the real world and in the process playing with space-time and intelligibility is carried over to television and the possibilities of its science-fiction-like extension into unthought of modalities. In another passage in which a different time factor, memory, is discussed there is a play on dream, TV, and psychoanalytic projection: I will write down all your names in my gold pen and ink. Everyday, precious, while m'm'ry's leaves are falling deeply on my Jungfraud's Messongebook I will dream telepath posts dulcets on this isinglass stream (but don't tell him or I'll be the mort of him!) under the libans and the sickamours, the cyprissis and babilonias, where the frondoak rushes to the ask and the yewleaves too kisskiss themselves and 'twill carry on my hearz'waves my still waters reflections in words over Margrate von Hungaria, her Quaidy ways and her Flavin hair, to thee, Jack, ahoy, beyond the boysforus. (460.18-27)

While 'hearz'waves' (Hertzian waves is an older term for radio waves named after Heinrich Hertz, who expanded the electromagnetic theory of light in such a way as to allow for the development of the wireless telegraph and radio) link 'telepath posts' to 'television' as well as telegraphy, memory's leaves are instantly carried by the hearts (Ger., herz = heart) waves, which govern the flow of blood, which produces the dream, from Ireland — the head or top of the 'Neuropean' — through the Bosphorus, 'beyond the boysforus,' to the Black Sea - its lower parts.12 The air carries wireless messages and the blood stream neuro-chemical messages, just as Tristans messages were carried by twigs on the stream that ran through Isolde's bedroom.13 In the process, the potentially solipsistic aspect of diary writing is critiqued and dissolved into modes of intersubjectivity and dissemination. In the satiric parody on Lewis mentioned earlier in which Professor Jones makes comical geometrical comments about TV, he also speaks about anthropological theory. As a comment about the temporal evolution implicit in Darwin's Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, the professor goes on to declare that 'the inception and the descent and the endswell of Man is temporarily wrapped in obscenity' (150.30-2). Later the Wake refers to the former work as the 'the origin of spices' (504.26) or speaks of it as 'remounting aliftle towards the ouragan of the spaces. Just how grand in cardinal rounders is this preeminent giant' (504.14). Jones notes that when considering 'the descent of... man,' he looks 'at these accidents with the faroscope of television' and 'can easily believe heartily in my own most spacious immensity' (150.30-151.7), because TV, as a result of that 'descent,' produces a

The New Techno-Culture of Space-Time

149

'spacious immensity' because it transcends the time of transmission through its audiovisual immediacy. This is later reflected in Joyce's prophetic description of a bar-room TV broadcast (see above chapter 5), where the TV image is seen to be both a heliotropical dream at nightime — for technicolour is itself a kind of'collideorscape' (kaleidoscope) - and a projected image — 'a charge of the light barricade in 'noughtitme,' a fictive time or time degree zero. The following is the concluding parenthesis which terminates the Butt and Taff TV encounter that has been being broadcast in the bar-room: [The pump and pipe pingers are ideally recomtituterd. The putther and bowk are peterpacked up. All the presents are determining as regards for the future the howabouts of their past absences which they might see on at hearing could they once smell of tastes from touch. To ought find a values for. The must overlistingness. When ex what is ungiven. As ad where. Stillhead. Blunk.} (355.1-7)

Joyce here notes the collapsing of time and space in this mode of communication with its striving for a more inclusive virtuality ('ideally reconstituted') and simultaneously satirizes its potential use for advertising. The ad - which is an adding of nothing (ad as add) and to nowhere (L., ad = to) of what is 'ungiven' and has a value of zero — here announces the end of and beginning of a cycle, for it is the parenthetical conclusion of the Butt and Taff encounter as the screen goes silent and blank. As the discussion of the 'abnihilisation of the etym' in chapter 5 has indicated, Joyce consciously demolishes the centrality of verbal language and the stability of the sign symbol by using his multiplexly overlayered verbal structure to play with the bits and pieces of a fragmented society to produce an effect of instantaneity and a moment in and out of mechanical time. Dream, film or TV, and the eventual emergence of virtual or artificial digitally assembled realities all indicate areas of communication within which the analytic of a duality of time and space is not adequate. Lewis's attack on Joyce is aimed at the theoretical and practical intuitions in his works of how what might now be called the prehistory of cyberspace went hand-in-hand with the avant-garde arts and the new understanding of space-time.1 For Joyce, then, TV or film does not have a bias towards space or time - it both teleframe[s] spatially and bombards with light temporally. This involves a complex relationship to the central nervous system and the senses which McLuhan, borrowing from Joyce, spoke about as tactility, but more precisely today would be dubbed multi- or intersensory. At the most simplistic level, this might imply, as the dream suggests, that 'television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!' (52.18-19), though even this apparently straightforward statement is ambivalent as to whether the eyes are seeing or being seen. But elsewhere we are told that 'if

150

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

you are looking for the bilder [i.e., the pictures as well as the assembler or maker] deep your ear on the movietone!' (62.9). In presenting an icon of one Duff-Muggli, Joyces dream action uses the mechanical technology which immediately preceded TV - the scophonic system of supersonic light control: 'his dectroscophonious photosensition under suprasonic light control may be logged for by our none too distant futures as soon astone values can be turned out from Chromophilomos, Limited at a millicentime the microamp' (123.11-13). The interplay here of aspects of tone, light, colour ('chromo-'), time, and energy (millicentime and microamp) indicates the complex way that Joyce presents the space-time complex and its role in communication. But this image of Duff-Muggli is simultaneously talking about the nature of and dicussing the textual interpretation of a manuscript — a 'book of Morses.' In the reading or rewriting of this manuscript, light, chromatic tone, time, and space interplay for the manuscript is 'acutely professionally piquM, to = introduce a notion of time [upon a plane (?) sii ' ' f^'e'] by punct! ingh oles (sic) in iSpace?!' (124.10-12). Paralleling the scophonic system of proto-TV with the pre-print calligraphy of the manuscript as a proto-book identifies writing, manuscript, book, dream, and TV production all as texts, for the interplay of space-time with the sensory spectrum and central nervous system need not be confined to electric media. This interplay has always already been everywhere present (though not as obviously so) even in the earliest modes of communication. Neither is the contemporary 'charge of the light barricade' the first role light plays in communication! The codification, production, reproduction, or transmission of all types of texts - from verbal collage to filmic (or televisible) collage to the total virtuality of dream or some future more inclusive coenaesthetic and synaesthetic mode of communication — involves space-time and light. Understanding the nature of light is an aspect of understanding at a cosmic level that the spatio-temporal universe and its conjunction with light produces this 'chaosmos of Alle' (118.21), a chaosmos that is always changing but alternatively expanding and contracting. Joyce presents a world in which the ambivalences of space, time, and space-time, the ambivalence of light as wave or particle, and the uncertainties of communication itself are essential aspects of its 'ambiviolence.'15 Differences in local time and Greenwich Mean Time (standardized time), which still officially existed in the early twentieth century in some jurisdictions such as Ireland (since the time at the observatory at Dunsink used in Ireland was twentyfive minutes behind G.M.T.), are juxtaposed against 'ambiviolent' linguistic undecidability: - A triduum before Our Larry's own day. By which of your chronos, my man of four watches, larboard, starboard, dog or dath?

The New Techno-Culture of Space-Time

151

- Dunsink, rugby, ballast and ball. You can imagine. - Language this allsfare for the loathe of Marses ambiviolent about it. (517.36-518.3; McHugh quotes from Ulysses - 'After one. Timeball on the ballast office is down. Dunsink time' - and points out the observatory is at Rugby School)16 The multiplexity of time in the Wake is natural to the 'chaosmos' of Joyces waking dream. The 'teleframe' of the new technological production includes among the many complex spatio-temporal relationships two generally accepted conceptions of time which Joyce also uses. Most recent anlayses in critical theory of the time spectrum have tended to emphasize two time motifs, somewhat different from those mentioned in the earlier analysis of Lewis, but which have a central role in the Wake — linear (mechanistic time) and cyclical (the imaginary time of the Nietzschean eternal return or the historical-cosmological time of Vico's theory of history). But even that distinction presents some complexities, for first of all cyclical time can come to have its own kind of linearity, as exemplified in the structure of the Wake, which at one level moves from life to death, but a death that is a return to life; and in the second place, cyclical time in some of its manifestations (such as in Vico and Yeats) becomes a kind of spiral time - a combination of progression without end as well as regression and return — in which each cycle is repeated but only as the 'seim anew.' It is worthwhile observing here that Joyce uses Vico (and possibly this is the way Vico regarded his own argument) and Vico's classical and medieval precursors to see the course and recourse of history as an oscillating movement involving a fourpart cycle to return where one begins. Consequently, each new four-part cycle repeats what has preceded before, but in a slightly rearranged and changed form producing the movement of a gyre, spiral, or helix rather than a closed cyclicity. This is 'history as her is harped ... Plunger words what paddle verbed. Mere man's mime: God has jest. The old order changeth and lasts like the first' (486.6-10). Therefore, as the dream moves to a close, all contrarieties are seen as participating in an oscillating 'chaosmos': 'Shamwork, be in our scheining! And let every crisscouple be so crosscomplimentary, little eggons, youlk and meelk, in a farbiger pancosmos ... Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled. Fuitfiat? (613.10-14). Joyce sees a 'chaosmos' in mathematico-scientific cosmological terms in which 'order is othered' in a closed, yet expanding, universe governed by the future preterite sense of the inversion of God's act at the creation ex nihilo - 'Fuitfiat!' instead of Tiatfuit' (L.,fiat = let there be; L.,fait = there was).17 The spatio-temporal contextualization of history comes to a climax in the 'Inquisition of Yawn,' where the annalists explore the space of the sleeping giant

152 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics preparatory to their psycho-historical 'examination' of him. 'Afeared themselves were to wonder at the class of a crossroads puzzler he would likely be, length by breadth nonplussing his thickness, ells upon ells of him, making so many square yards of him' (475.3-6). The proportions rapidly become cosmic: 'The meteor pulp of him, the seamless rainbowpeel... His bellyvoid of nebulose with his heverstop navel... And his veins shooting melanite phosphor, his creamtocustard cometshair and asteroid knuckles, ribs and members ... His electro latiginbous twisted entrails belt' (475.12-16). Just as later the corpse of HCE is said to be 'lying high as in he lay in all dimensions' (498.28). The four, approaching the object of their inquiry, are 'seeking spoor through the deep timefield' (475.24). This probing is 'history as her is harped' (486.6), that 'slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history' (186.1—2) of Shem the poet told in 'one continuous present tense.' Yawn's psycho-history, thus, unfolds in cosmological space-time and concludes with a melding of spatio-temporal perceptions, for when the inquisition concludes and we move into the fog surrounding the Porter bedroom there is 'a cry off. Where are we all? Whenabouts in the name of space?' (558.32-3). As relativity theory, quantum theory, and the uncertainty principle are developed, Joyce recognizes the role of spado-temporality in modern physics, along with historical time. The Wake through Jones's 'chance ridiculisation' of time philosophies, reveals that the 'theories of Winestain' envision a universe where 'quality and tality' functions 'alternativomentally' (149.32), about which Jones is writing 'a quantum theory ... for it is really the most tantumising state of affairs' (149.35—6). Quantum theory and the earlier, more conservative theories of Einstein develop links between the Wakes preoccupation with light and the new scientifically grounded techno-culture. After a number of references to Planck and other theoretical physicists as well as Einstein, the fact that the culmination of Finnegans Wake is introduced by a debate about the nature of light, and that the entire dream action is a dream about that 'daylit dielate night of nights' (83.27), and a particular night - the Easter Vigil that is a feast of light - underlines that the centrality of contemporary debates about theories of light from Helmholtz on should not be surprising. This unravelling of the mystery of light involves mathematics, physics, optics, theory of perception, psychology, and sociology, which themselves involve concepts of space-time, quantum theory, the structure of the central nervous system, the social construction of self, and the transmission of social conventions, which make it a semiotic parable of technologies of communication. For Joyce the complexity of times and spaces also includes 'physical space,' Visual space,' 'acoustic space,' and 'architectural space' (for example, 'I shall have a word to say in a few yards about the acoustic and orchidectural management of the tonehall' [165.8-9]). This permits him to develop complex analyses of modes of communication, as in his recognizing a role for light both in his discussion of

The New Techno-Culture of Space-Time

153

manuscript and of television - stressing the 'same renew' (226.17) - and to place these analyses within their social context, while at the same time linking them discontinuously with the past. One aspect of Joyces parodic reply to Lewis occurs in Joyces punning on the title of one of his own earliest critical writings, 'The Day of Rabblement,' when Shaun, as a Wyndham Lewis type, attacks the poet-brother Shem-Joyce for his 'rightdown lowbrown schisthematic robblement' (424.36), a portmanteau that combines systematic, schematic, and thematic - a combination that could easily describe Joyce's complex play with synchrony and diachrony and Lewis's condemnation of it. The 'ab[-]nihilisation of the etym' does not destroy or erase the 'etym'; it transforms it and yet retains its traces. In Joyce, the so-called postmodern rupture is an always already present 'schisthematic' history.

12 Cultural Production and the Dynamic Mechanics of Quanta and the Chaosmos

Producers are consumers because the prime manifestation of self-consciousness is communicability, intersubjective interaction. This can only be conceived through the molding of a multiple series of styles that take advantage of the fact that language and communication are always 'ambiviolent,' governed by an uncertainty principle and consequently operating much as subatomic physical phenomena do, one moment seeming to be a flow, the next a series of paniculate entities. Joyce underlines this by consciously identifying his work with quantum theory. Elsewhere in Joyce's satiric attack on his prime critic, he has Wyndham Lewis as Professor Jones (1.6) mockingly charge that the author is confusing the 'tality' or 'suchness' of a thing (its substance) with the 'quality' of a thing (its role in the transitory), so that it 'may be said to equate the qualis equivalent with the older socalled talis on tails one just as quantly as in the hyperchemical economantarchy the tanturn ergons irruminate the quantum urge so that eggs is to whey as whay is to zeed' (FW\ 67.4-8). This interplay of language and quantum theory in Professor Jones's attack on the Wake clearly situates the book as propounding a theory of intersubjective communication and language that could be described as involving complementarity (or the uncertainty principle). Joyce's satiric reply to Lewis made clear not only that the space-time of relativity theory presented problems for Lewis - as we have seen in the previous chapter but that Lewis would also find the later and more radical quantum theory (19206)1 equally, if not more, problematic. The transformational ambiguities of a spacetime world were problematic for Lewis, particularly with regard to his work as a painter, because they undermined a belief in the presumed solidity of spatial relations. The uncertainty principle, a corollary of quantum theory that states it is impossible with respect to a particle to 'make experiments and measurements which permit us to make the localization in space-time and the dynamic state simultaneously precise,'2 was just as problematic, if not more so. In contradistinc-

Dynamic Mechanics of Quanta

155

tion to Lewis, the Wake flirts oneirically with the issues raised by quantum mechanics, since the dream action is permeated by waves - water, air, sound, electromagnetic - and by the mysteries of light and colour. While quantum theory is not properly speaking chaotic, nor was it recognized as such when first articulated, the implications of the uncertainty (or complementarity) principle coupled with the crisis in contemporary mathematics probably permitted Joyce and many of his contemporaries to intuit that the cosmos could be regarded as tending towards an orderly disorder. Joyce's concept of 'chaosmos' (118.21) is active across the domain of linguistics (in relation to which the term is first introduced); the domain of physics and chemistry (relativity, quantum mechanics, and complementarity); and the domain of mathematics (subsequent to Cantor's exploration of the concept of infinity and his discovery of transfinite numbers). With regard to language and communication, Joyce notes this 'chaosmic' quality, for 'language this allsfare for the loathe of Marses ambiviolent about it' (518.23). It is noteworthy that he does this by linking a biblical reference (Moses) to the machinic language of Morse code and to the language of warfare (Mars) as 'ambiviolent' (ambivalent and yet surrounded or enmeshed in violence). Writing also participates in such ordered disorder, as manifested in the signature of the manuscript which is said to be 'of an incompletet trail or dropped final; a round thousand whirligig glorioles, prefaced by (alas!) now illegible airy plumeflights, all tiberiously ambiembellishing the initials majuscule of Earwicker' (119.14—17). The poet, then, is an 'ambitrickster' (423.6), and of cognition itself it can be noted in a marginal note that ANTITHESIS OF AMBIDUAL ANTICIPATION. THE MIND FACTORY, ITS GIVE AND TAKE. (282.L1-4) Since quantum mechanics, which Joyce adapts to language, can, like the relativity theory, be regarded as an abstract mathematical machine, it is not surprising that the machinic is again stressed in 'the mind factory,' yet in a context that describes the Joycean tactic of generating multiplexly overlayered differences. For example, note how Shaun is introduced as the central figure of the first of the three watches in III.l: 'other than (and may his hundred thousand welcome stewed letters, relayed wand postchased, multiply, ay faith and plutiply!) Shaun himself (404.36-405.2). Here a phrase such as 'relayed wand postchased' is itself an example of how words 'plutiply,' for 'postchased' overlayers the following possible meanings: the 'post' (i.e., Shaun) being 'chased'; delivering letters with post haste'; the mail being carried in a 'post-chaise' (four-wheeled carriage); something being delivered when 'purchased'; and a possible ironic insinuation that the post-

156 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics man himself is not 'chaste.' This multiplex strategy has been neatly exemplified in passage discussed earlier - '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' (482.33-5) - for the language itself illustrates both the counterpointing of words and some of the basic strategies for doing this - puns and portmanteaux, particularly emphasizing subalternate, contrary, and contradictory relationships. Quantum theory is again introduced specifically on two occasions in the Yawn episode (III.3) with references to Max Planck. It is first mentioned at the beginning of the episode when the four evangelists-historians-inquisitors-psychoanalysts set up their network for enmeshing the sleeping Yawn: And as they were spreading abroad on their octopuds their drifter nets, the chromous gleamy seiners' nets and, no lie, there was word of assonance being softspoken among those quartermasters ... For it was in the back of their mind's ear, temptive lissomer, how they would be spreading in quadriliberal their azurespotted fine attractable nets, their nansen nets ... And in their minds years backslibris, so it was, slipping beauty, how they would be meshing that way, when he rose to it, with the planckton at play about him, the quivers of scaly silver and their clutches of chromes of the highly lucid spanishing gold whilst, as hour gave way to mazing hour, with Yawn himself keeping time with his thripthongue, to ope his blurbeous lips he would, a let out classy, the way myrrh of the moor and molten moonmist would be melding mellifond indo his mouth. -Y? (477.11-31)

The 'play' of these planckton' around Yawn's emerging pneuma in 'their drifter nets, the chromous gleamy seiners' nets,' partly results from photo-reflection - silver, chrome, and gold. 'Planckton,' which melds plankton with Planck, plays in part upon the notion of monitoring or measuring paniculate matter - whether bits of information or plankton — and on how in this monitoring process 'hour gave way to mazing hour' (italics mine). The amazing uncertainty of the subatomic microcosm ('microbemost cosm' [151.1]) is a function of looking at phenomena both as paniculate and wave-like, a theory and its subsequent logic which Joyce has used to fashion an imaginary universe. This uncertainty arises in electro-magnetic activities which constantly occur in our world, for as we have learned of ALP as Amnisty Ann, 'Call Her Calamity Electrifies Man' (207.29). The flows (waves) and discontinuities (particles) are clearly necessary for a person to be a 'harmonic condenser enginium' (310.1) with a 'howdrocephalous enlargement' (310.6; water ['hydro-'] + brain + HCE and ALP = '-cephal-'). But the macrocosmic poses other possibilities for disorderly order. Relating

Dynamic Mechanics of Quanta

157

highly speculative theories of seriality of universes to contemporary theories of an infinitely expanding universe (Hubble and Eddington), Joyce implies that a primary principle of hermetic philosophy and alchemy is reiterated in the parallel between 'macrochasm' and microcosm in the new techno-culture: The tasks above are as the flasks below, saith the emerald canticle of Hermes and all's loth and pleasestir, are we told, on excellent inkbotde authority, solarsystemised, seriolcosmically, in a more and more almightily expanding universe under one, there is rhymeless reason to believe, original sun. Securely judges orb terrestrial. Haudcerto ergo. (263.21-8) This treatment of seriality and the expanding, yet 'expending,' universe as seriocomic is then undercut by the comment that the world judges not at all certainly, so that either way a chaotic cosmos of disorderly order appears to emerge. Somewhat later there is another reference to physics which comically links concepts of finitude and infinity, grammatical processes, and physical theory with the tale of the Fall, the apple, and the tree: - I've got that now, Dr Melamanessy. Finight mens mid-infinite true. The form masculine. The gender feminine. I see. Now, are you derevatov of it yourself in any way? The true tree I mean? Let's hear what science has to say, pundit-the-next-best-king. Splanck! - Upfellbowm. (505.24-9)

The pun on German apple tree ('Upfellbowm' = Ger., Apfelbaum) with the apple falling upward in response to the 'Splanck' (Planck) clearly plays on turning Newton's theory upside down — an obvious reference to quantum mechanics and the new physics. There is a further reference to new senses of the finite and the inifinite, for 'Finight mens mid-infinite true' suggests a man who is finite and has a finite mind (i.e., L., mens = mind) which in the world of the imaginary or during the 'night' while dreaming can become 'infinite.'4 The finitude of the universe posited by relativity theory counterpoints the infinitude that fascinates theorists of a quantum dynamics, of an expanding universe, or of contemporary mathematics. The 'ambiviolent' nature of the Joycean 'chaosmos' is further illustrated by the paradoxes that multiply with the exploration of infinities of infinity. The crisis in contemporary mathematics discussed in chapter 10 provides a prime focus for chaotic processes, because Joyce alludes directly to the then recently revealed problems underlying the foundations of mathematics. These new fixes on old arithmetical paradoxes supplemented by relativity theory and quantum mechanics enabled Joyce to apprehend the presence and significance of chaotic phenomena (even though they did not begin to be directly confronted by scientific researchers until the development of chaos theory in the 1970s, three

158 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics decades after Joyce's death). The keys to the intuition of the universe as a 'chaosmos' were a function of the new techo-scientific world, including the sciences and mathematics as well as the 'dime cash' problems of the economic system. This is of most interest because Joyce extended the logic of flows and discontinuities and the paradoxes of serial order to language itself. He posits a quantum-like theory of the interplay of the synchronic-diachronic axes and the paradigmatic-syntactic axes of language, so that lexical units can be both identified as seeming to be paniculate and as appearing to form the wave-like movement of a flow; but they cannot simultaneously be discerned both as the particle (e.g., paronomasia marked by a single lexical item) and as the flow (e.g., paronomasia marked by the function of the lexical item in the syntactic context). Similarly, the diachronic aspect of lexicography interplays with the present semantic impact of the multiple meanings, so that the type of Viconian etymology interacts with the paradigmatic and syntactic situation of the lexical item. One of the more remarkable indications of Joyce's theoretic insight into language is how, by extending this principle into the interaction of speech and print, he anticipates the central importance of the dialectic of orality and literacy, not only prior to the writings of Ong, Havelock, Innis, and Goody, but even before the seminal work of Milman Parry and Jack Lord on oral literature and tale-telling. In the process of writing Ulysses, Joyce gradually discovered that the full development of the monologue inttrieur - which had to be grounded in transitory thought and intersubjective communicability — resulted in that cataclysmic event for traditional linguistics and poetics mentioned earlier, the smashing of the 'etym.' In the process of that explosion, it became clear to Joyce that any form of communication, film form, or even the material basis of language — its existence in units of speech and writing, phones and graphs - had to be approached by following a principle of complementarity. There is both a dynamic stream of syntactic movement and relatively static moments of arrested attention on particular units in which the precise nature of a particular word or word-phrase is the focus. While the reader attends to the moving stream, the ability to focus on the particular units declines; when the focus shifts to those particular units, the ability to grasp the moving stream dissipates. Chaotic phenomena were familiar to scientists of Joyce's generation, although there were no formal attempts to deal with them, but Joyce's sense of his world as a perpetual 'order othered' and his interest in probability theory were sufficient for him to intuit a 'chaosmos' - a 'chaotic cosmos,' an ordered disorder. Quantum theory, relativity, and Godel's theorem were sufficient indications when joined to the critiques of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud towards a 'rage for disorder.' Joyce, interested in the machinic processes of life and language, developed a theory of poetic language which treats the 'etym' as a basic particle and then plays with the vertical

Dynamic Mechanics of Quanta

159

and horizontal axes of language - the synchronic and diachronic, the interaction of the paradigmatic and syntactic, and the potential of lexical meaning and contextual meaning within semantic units. This machinic theory of poetic language dramatizes the fact that each etym cannot simultaneously be assessed, fixed, and localized (synchronically, paradigmatically, and lexically) at the same time that it is apprehended in the force of the 'languo of flows' (FW621.22) (diachronically, syntactically, and contextually). Joyce extrapolated his discovery from the same types of principles that underlie Lewis Carroll's nonsense verse, Jabberwocky, although he apparently did not become familiar with Carroll's work until the 1930s. His approach to the interplay of the bits of language with the flow of language fitted well with a complex exploitation of these principles which he shared with such nonsense verse, but which he developed far more extensively and complexly. When Alice queries Humpty Dumpty about the meaning of Jabberwocky that she had read in the room on the other side of the looking-glass, his reply suggests the principle by which Jabberwocky works: Twas brillig and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble on the wabe All mimsy were the borogoves And the mome rath outgrabe.

In nonsense we can pick up an illusion of sense from the flow, for in its flow 'the slithy toves, did gyre and gimble on the wabe' makes sense, even if it lacks meaning. When we try to make it mean something, we pause over the particular major semantic items, such as 'slithy toves' and 'gyre and gimble,' grasping from phonoaesthetic association an illusion (perhaps through allusion) of meaning — 'slithy': slithery and lithe, where by phono-aesthetic association the phonetic cluster /si-/ further suggests slip, slime, slink, and the like; or the affinity of a voiced labial l-vl to a voiced dental 1-6.1 in 'tove' suggests something which is and isn't like a toad. Joyce grasped the theoretic significance of such nonsense patterns and of portmanteau words but vastly amplified their potential. Joyce goes much further than Carroll's nonsense did to develop an ambivalent play with sense and meaning. Take the opening words from a section of III.2 in the Wake which retells Aesop's fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper' as the 'Ondt and the Gracehoper' (4l4ff): 'The gracehoper was always jigging a jog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity' (414.22-3). Attending to the flow, the words obviously make a statement, which has both an illusion of meaning and allusions to meaning; but the only way to try to clarify that meaning is to pause momentarily on the major semantic items: 'gracehoper,' 'akkant,' and 'joyicity.' As soon as one does, it

160

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

is apparent 'gracehoper' is a compound of grace and hope, but it is also a portmanteau word, suggesting grasshopper - and all of this was partly implicit in its original phonology and orthography. But what does one do with the combination grace, hope, and grasshopper? It may suggest that grasshoppers in their lifestyle seem to hope for an unbought grace which preserves them from threats, yet this is only an illusion of meaning. But if the 'gracehoper' is happy 'akkant' of 'joyicity,' the play with meaning becomes more complex. 'Akkant' certainly suggests Kant and his categorical imperative, which combines with account, but not only in the sense of on account of, but in the sense of an accounting for, while 'joyicity' adds even more complexity, involving words such as Joyce, the author's name, joy with a hint of rejoice, and possibly joy in city. In any case, 'joyicity' is something different from joy. Reinserted in the flow, all the meanings operate, but we can only sense them as a kind of merge. There is a flow with an illusion of sense from which the ambivalent meaning can only be reconstructed by focusing on the particular items, and yet when the particular items are put back in the flow, they cannot all be grasped simultaneously. A reader-listener cannot observe the flow and all the details of the particular moments simultaneously. But interestingly enough, neither can this be done with complex sentences involving transitory states. This is an intensification of the kind of effect William James describes in a detailed discussion of the sentence 'Columbus discovered America in 1492.'5 Joyces use of this strategy can become very complex. In the previous chapter, in the example of a moment when the flowing movement of the dream comments on its own methodology, the uncertainty and complementarity of language are powerfully manipulated to produce that complex ambivalent interplay of ear-eye-code-chord-decode-dechord which explicates the co-presence of 'bits' and flows, and which, produced by the syntactical code, provides a revealing comment on the communicative process. In Finnegans Wake Joyce transforms our perspective of the way languages function and interact. Just as the complementarity principle in physics underlines our inability to measure simultaneously the position and the movement of an atom, the Wake dramatizes our inability to account simultaneously for the paniculate unit and the syntactic flow. As in everyday measurements, we may tend to be Newtonians, so in everyday communication we can tend to be Cartesians - Joyces dream quips, 'Drink deep or touch not the Cartesian springs.' But once the readerwriter or thinker turns towards the integrated bodily experience of 'feelful thinkamalinks,' she or he participates in the new culture of time-space of his age. This requires that 'the etym' (353.24) 'explodotonates through Parsuralia' (353.25—6; Pars + Uralia [i.e., the Urals] + Parser + alia, the territory of the parsers); for parsing becomes nearly impossible when it is no longer feasible to analyse simultaneously the movement of syntax and to break that flow up into transparent particles.

Dynamic Mechanics of Quanta

161

Joyce simultaneously intensifies within language both that interplay between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic (what Roman Jakobson called similarity and contiguity), and the interplay between the oral and the literate (printed or written) to a point where the essential uncertainty of meaning is made manifest - for 'this is nat language at any sinse of the world' (83.12). The criss-crossing of the crafting of night language with Freudian dream language and Saussurean semiotics brings forth the necessary uncertainty of Freud's 'machinic' investigations into the subjective language implicit in the dream-work, the work of the unconscious or the imaginary. If the paradigmatic and syntagmatic interplay in this manner, Joyce complicates the equation by creating a parallel uncertainty through the collision of speech and writing, orality and literacy, a matter he continually calls attention to in a variety of references to sound sense, such as: 'wanamade singsigns to soundsense an yit he wanna git all his flesch nuemaid motts truly prural and plusible' (138.7-9); or, 'Behove this sound of Irish sense. Really? Here English might be seen. Royally? One sovereign punned to petery pence. Regally? The silence speaks the scene. Fake!' (12.36-13.3); or 'Do you think we are tonedeafs in our noses to boot? Can you not distinguish the sense, prain, from the sound, bray?' (522.28-30). The very nature of the book itself is 'chaotic,' as life itself is 'chaotic,' so that 'chance,' which gives rise to poetry and also underpins the very potentiality for semiotic systems to communicate (since improbability or negentropy is essential to communication), is as central to the Wake as it was to the various avant-garde movements, especially surrealism. Thus, the book as a communicating machine and the book as a poetic act are closely integrated in the multiplex playing with differences in which Joyce is engaged. In an interview with Jacques Mercanton — which next to Joyce's Letters is one of the most detailed sources for remarks that Joyce made about Finnegans Wake Joyce obviously manifested great pleasure that his interlocutor identified Leopold Bloom as a poet. 'You must be the first to notice,' Joyce observed. 'In general readers have looked down on Bloom. If in Ulysses Bloom is described as a 'kinetic poet,' then HCE in the Wake is also a poet, as Anna notes in her concluding monologue: 'But there's a great poet in you, too' (619.31). In the same conversation, Joyce referred to 'the kind of artist's intuition that anticipates science.' Joyce provided Mercanton with some insights into the integration of major themes in his 'night' book. The exploration of dream, the grounding of poetry in 'laws' of human science, and the nature of every person being in their own right an artist are linked together, for, as he told Mercanton, in his dreambook he conjured up the two characters Shem and Shaun: the one who acts and the one who watches others act, and who between them make up the complete figure of the artist. That

162 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics is, of man, since for him man is definable only under that aspect: homofaber, he who reflects and he who fashions. His thin countenance, with its bleak profile, lighted up as he recalled all the faces he had seen in his dreams, he who could hardly distinguish the people who surrounded him in life. This gesture, that detail of clothing, the reappearance of a character all obey certain laws, and those laws were what concerned him. They were to form the structure of his work. His voice warmed, was almost confiding.7

Apart from revealing Joyces interest in non-verbal communication - gesture and fashion - these observations emphasize two important theoretical aspects of his work: first, the belief that every person is a poet and, secondly, his conception of poetry as the foundation for a 'new science.' Since Joyce considered poetic vision to be the basis of a 'new science,' Vice's New Science became the ambivalent parodic structural scaffolding for the Wake. In developing the Wakes theoretical orientation, Joyce used techniques derived from medicine, engineering, and the sciences. Shaun-Jaun flippantly declares, 'Sifted science will do your arts good' (440.19), while Shem, who 'displaid all the oathword science of his visible disgrace' (227.23), is a contemporary 'alshemist.' (It is worth noting that 'alchemist' is a term that has more recently been attributed to the gurus of the electronic revolution!) Shem as penman, a type of the Egyptian god Thoth, is a scribe. 'He is General Jinglesome,' who is told to 'go in for scribenery with the satiety of arthurs in S.P.Q.R.ish and inform to the old sniggering publicking press and nation of sheepcopears the whole plighty troth between them' (229.7-9). The poet, then, is primarily a scribe whether his mode of expression is oral, written, print, or electric media. In his description of Shem's making paper and ink from his own body, Joyce also stresses the complex relation between writing and speech by including an allusion to the Vulgate version of Psalm 44.2: 'My tongue is the pen of a scribe writing swiftly' (185.22). This anticipation of post-structuralist complexity in Joyce's view of script is clear in the opening of II. 1, the Teenichts Playhouse,' which is wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. In four tubbloids' (219.16-18). The medley of broadcast, multi-linguality, sound, writing, film, and newspaper plays through this passage, demonstrating how inscription occurs in all modes of human communication. For Joyce the printed book is just a critical stage in the long history of 'scripts,' so that when he wants to analyse the nature of his poetic production, he turns to manuscripts and letter writing. While recognizing the major cultural impact of Gutenberg, his project is nevertheless to transform the nature of the printed book. He challenges the apparent standardization and stability of the post-seventeenth century book by simultaneously utilizing sound and sense, phonetic unit and letter. In addition to his extensive verbal experimentation, he makes even 'standard' words read differently. Paralleling the way that his multiplicity of tales summons

Dynamic Mechanics of Quanta

163

forth the dramatic motive upon which narration is grounded, his multiplexity of the elements of the book summons forth the gestural, scriptural, and material traces upon which print is grounded. By these means the poetry of the printed book can be adjusted to acknowledge the new technologies of light, sound, and movement and to contribute to the imaginary understanding of these new technologies. Joyces post-electric book,8 'the bog of the depths' (516.25), is a parodic imaginary 'sunpictorsbosk' (351.24) and also 'buikdanseuses' (98.12), for the Wake is a 'sendence of sundance' (615.2) whose 'scheme is like your rumba round me garden, allatheses' (309.7—8; i.e., according to the 'theses').9 But it is also an assemblage or pastiche of many overlayerings of different bookish genres. To select a few of the many different ways 'the authordux Book of Lief (425.20) is described, it is: a 'book of craven images' (563.4), 'Jungfraud's Messongebook' (460.20), a 'unique hornbook' (422.15), a 'book of breedings' (410.1), one of the 'Hireark Books' (409.34), a 'complaint book' (448.9), a 'usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles' (179.27), a 'Monster Book of Paltryattic Puetrie' (178.17), a 'book of Morses' (123.35), the 'book of Doublends Jined' (20.15), and 'the book of the opening of the mind to light' (258.31). The preceding descriptions of the book associate it with a wide variety of genres and other forms and objects. It is a cowardly book ('craven') that evades censorship and moralistic attack through its complex language based on a reinterpretation and revaluation of Jung and Freud, while being fictional, hence a book of fraud and lies ('messonge') that plays with the possible fraud and lies of the psychoanalytic encounter. Then, it is a rudimentary text, a child's book, a primer of the new techno-cultural semiotic universe and a secularized sacred book of prophecy (a 'morse-erse wordybook' [530.19]; a dictionary + Morse code + the intuition of language as code), and a work 'to steal our historic presents from the past postpropheticals so as to will make us all lordy heirs and ladymaidesses' (11.30—1). Moreover, it is a book about monsters and a book of monstrous size and complexity that is a pastiche of poetry — classic Greek, patriotic, minor or petty ('paltryattic'), excremental or scatalogical ('puetrie'), and pure, pious, beautiful ('Opura epia bella? [178.17]), and musical (for the words are from Verdi's Aidd). Furthermore, it is also a book of complaints - poems of lamentation and meditations, usually monologues - and a book of satire and lamentations - a 'jeeremyhead sindbook' (229.32; a jeering Jeremiad and the biblical book of Lamentations of Jeremiah). This virtual 'comicsongbook' (380.24) is a parodic history and joke book 'Quick, quake, quoke. A parrotbook of dates.' The assembled complexity of books and tales is conceived to 'open the mind to light,' but paradoxically as a 'lingerous longerous book of the dark' (251.24), so that in its complexity - its density and its

164

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

status as a 'dreambook' - it quite literally becomes a 'book of the depth' (621.3) about the 'innersense' (and innocence) of everyone. Naturally, with this legacy, it is a 'suppressed book' (356.20), containing the genealogy of socialites ('the book of breedings' [410.1]) and pornography, 'the bluest book of baile's annals' (13.21-2), and like another blue book, Ulysses, which originally had blue covers, the Wake is both a useless, unreadable book ('to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles, edition de tenebres' [179.27—8]) and a book about a household (in Ulysses, on Eccles Street, where Bloom lived; in the Wake, in Chapelizod), about the Church and about Dublin. In its very structure, the Wake refers to the connection with Ulysses, for it is 'the book of Doublends jined' (20.16), ending where it begins and starting where it ends and poly-hermeneutically susceptible of 'three score and ten toptypsical readingfs]' (20.15). The Wake, then, is one of the major theoretical beginnings of the recognition of the intertextual book characteristically associated with contemporary writing, postmodernity, and hypertextuality. The Wake also recognizes that Joyce's earlier Ulysses has the very same intertextual nature, since at one of its many levels it is a metacommentary on that work. This is illustrated, for example, by a passage which speaks about the meaning of being a writer - going in for 'scribenery' - that contains a parodic outline of Ulysses broadcast in a telegraphese of headlines 'for all within crystal range' (229.12). (Note the use of the wireless radio again!) 'Ukalepe. Leathers' leave. Had Days. Nemo in Patria. The Luncher Out. Skilly and Carubdish. A Wondering Wreck. From the Mermaids' Tavern. Bullyfamous. Naughtsycalves. Mother of Misery. Walpurgas Nackt' (229.13-15). These are the central episodes of Ulysses (episodes 4 to 15): Calypso, Lotus Eaters, Hades, Aeolus, Lestrygonians, Scylla and Charybdis, Wandering Rocks, Sirens, Cyclops, Nausicaa, Oxen of the Sun, Circe. The early jottings for the Wake (the Scribbledehobble notebook [JJ28 Notebook VIA]), where the notes Joyce made are organized under headings referring to his earlier works and to the individual episodes of Ulysses, confirm the continuity that Joyce saw in his major writings and indicate the connection he initially envisioned between Ulysses and the Wake. One function of the Wake was to establish the intertextuality and radical modernity of Ulysses, in the face of early critical interpretations that Joyce himself regarded as misleading or irrelevant. All this detail about the muddled medley of books is relevant to Joyce's connecting art as techne with the artefactual construction of technologies and the reconstruction of art by those technologies. The modern book must recognize the new types of scribal activity taking place through the development of electro-chemical technologies of communication - production, reproduction, and distribution. While late in the nineteenth century Mallarme had envisioned the transformation of the book and the death of literature, Joyce, with nearly four decades of accumu-

Dynamic Mechanics of Quanta

165

lated awareness of technology, actually explores the problematic of the book at the end of the third decade of the twentieth century. The Wake, in which Joyce dramatizes the evolving modes of communication through linguistic metamorphoses, reflects a mixture of modes of production. Joyce produces a 'stew of the evening, booksyful stew' (268.14)10 (an allusion to the Mock Turtle's Song in Alice in Wonderland), because this 'new Irish stew' (190.9) is the result of new modes of popular cultural production like comics — 'a bodikin a boss in the Thimble Theatre' (268.14-15) - for the 'gramma's grammar' (268.16) of the Wake, unlike the logic of formal grammars that this phrase parodies (i.e., Charles-Pierre Girault's Grammaire des grammaires, a digest of grammatical opinions), consists of learning 'all the runes of the gamest game ever from my old nourse Asa' (279.Fl.19—20), a process that includes knowing about comic strips and animated cartoons and their characters like Olive Oyl, Winnie Carr, or Moon Mullins, and about pantomimes, films, and TV programs. To go further in exploring this transversally disseminated, Rabelaisian catalogue of books that reflexively unfolds, the Wake is a schoolroom geometry book and a precursor of comic books as well for 'comic cuts and series exerxeses always were to be capered in Casey's frost book of, page torn on dirty' (286.8-11).11 In Dolph's (i.e., Shem's) digression in the schoolroom (II.2), the Wake as a book itself is described as an assemblage of precise techniques: 'chanching letters for them vice o'verse to bronze mottes [Fr., bans mots = pleasantries + 'mottes' = mass of dirt or mound] and blending tschemes for em in tropadores and doublecressing twofold thruths and devising tingling tailwords' (288.1-3). The process invites chance and randomness through interpretation, as the poet is 'cunctant' (content + delaying + cunt[?]) to have others 'finish his sentence for him.' This is supplemented by the structure of schemes and themes and the music of language of a 'trapadour' (224.25; troubador) and its rhetorical potential for deviation or transgression (tropes) to create linguistic traps (224.25; trapdoors) and complex duplicities which generate contraries, contradictories, and paradoxes that 'doublecross' ('doublecressing twofold thruths' [288.4]) the reader, while inviting him to write the work — that is, 'to finish [the author's] sentence for him' (288.4— 5). If the book at one level is a collection of comic strips, at another it is a cinematic production with Shem 'retelling humself by the math hour, long as he's brood, a reel of funnish ficts apout the shee' (288.8-9); that is, about Anna and Izzy and about the 'little people.' The final appearance of the letter and the closing monologue are preceded by an audiovisual televizing of a debate on light to render forth the 'Rhythm and Colour at Park Mooting' and present the world with the 'Velivision victor' (610.34-5). The 'reel of funnish ficts about the shee' is, of course, the 'whole damning letter,' for this key passage underlines that linkage between chance and change (transfer-

166 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics mation) in cultural production, a process which is confirmed elsewhere,12 for the entire work - an 'eeridreme' (342.31), that is, a scary Irish dream - is asserted as 'being effered' (offered) through the random role-changing of Shem and Shaun. As quick-change artists and quacks, they play a vast variety of roles throughout the dream, such as in the figures of Butt and TaflF battling on the TV set in the pub, and thus they assume various poses, such as racetrack bookies or tipsters: 'by ... Tipp and Beff, our swapstick quackchancers, in From Topphole to Bottom of The Irish Race and World' (342.32-3). Techniques and mechanics, it must be remembered, construct the 'geomater,' write the letter and the book, and permit the 'mind factory' to operate, as the dream text's parody of Shakespeare underlines: 'With sobs for his job, with tears for his toil, with horror for his squalor but with pep for his perdition, lo, the boor plieth as the laird hireth him' (282.1-4).13 The 'mind factory,' through its 'trick stunts'(e.g., tropes, themes, schemes, and antitheses that dominate the conversation of everyday life), is thus crucial for the expression of everyday feelings which the inner consciousness of Bloom, HCE, Molly, and Anna dramatize. The fictional dramatization of the body-mind of each of his characters arises through the complexity shaped by the 'antithesis of ambidual anticipation' (282.LI) with its 'doublecressing of twofold thruths' (288.3) and produces the undeniable effectiveness of Joyce's characters as rich dramatizations of everyday people. The Joycean poet in the Wake constructing and producing the book is an instrument of knowledge in whose 'chaosmos' all declarations or assertions of knowledge — the communication and dissemination of knowledge — are filtered by power claims, changes in values, the impact of unintended consequences, and the circulation of knowledge within a polylogical revision of the double hermeneutic of the human sciences. There are many exemplars of the possession of specialized differential power within the Wake, such as Berkeley's druidical lore, Patrick's charisma, or Professor Jones's analytical ability. Kevin is another such figure with his 'search for love of knowledge through the comprehension of the unity in altruism through stupefaction' (604.31-3), a search that is related to his peculiar strengths, for 'whereon by prime, powerful in knowledge, Kevin came to where its center is' (605.18-19). Knowledge is mediated as well by changing values. These are characteristically related in the Wake either to a post-Marxist use value, (i.e., Valuse'), for 'he could find ... by practice the valuse of thine-to-mine articles with no reminder for an equality of relations and, with the helpings from his tables' (283.9-11), or to measurable use values, such as the value of livestock (69.17-18), of bricks (235.14), of real estate (41.34), of'spatiality' (172.9), and even of a variety of symbolic tokens — 'Wu Welsher ... for all values of his latters, integer integerrimost, was the formast of the firm?' (590.13-16). The Wake comprehensively exemplifies how often serendipitous, sometimes cat-

Dynamic Mechanics of Quanta

167

astrophic, unexpected consequences result from the exercise of knowledge, for in all its protean transformations it reproduces the same traits as its world, since 'every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving and changing every part of the time' (118.18-20). This 'chaosmos' is a world governed by the laws of chance. While the nature of the poetic machine requires assemblage, that is partly achieved by a cohesive linking together of 'Me drames' as 'the centuple celves of my egourge as Micholas de Cusack calls them ... by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that indentity of undiscernibles' (49.32-6). In this 'coincidance,' unintended consequences filter knowledge, for the very nature of this 'chaosmos' generates a situation of 'occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects' (482.36-483.1). To coincide is a form of'cooinsight' (551.34),14 so that a logic of chance is a supplementary way of knowing. Shem is quite aptly addressed as 'you (will you for the laugh of Scheekspair just help mine with the epithet?) semi-semitic serendipitist, you (thanks, I think that describes you) Europasianised Afferyank!' (191.1—4). Joyce's own ambivalent attitude towards the structural frameworks of his books involves accepting 'chance' (serendipity and coincidence) as an aspect of knowing. Serendipity for Joyce is another mode of knowledge, a product of a (poly-)logic of chance, which supplements information, intuition, reflection, and dissemination: 'and by my sevendialled changing charties Hibernska Ulitzas made not I to pass through twelve Threadneedles and Newgade and Vicus Veneris to cooinsight?' (551.32-4) - insight (knowledge) through coincidence. 'Cooinsight' is a type of knowledge, as the Wake suggests; dreaming is frequently serendipitous and Shem is a 'serendipitist' (191.3). (One might go further and suggest that Joyce had in mind his particular use of Vico's doctrine of poetic wisdom.) The role of chance as a frequently used term in Ulysses and the Wake, with its association with mathematical probability and quantum dynamics, is illustrated in the long description about Shem reflexively 'writing the mystery of himsel in furniture,' which comes to a climax in which, 'if one has the stomach to add the breakages, upheavals, distortions, inversions of all this chambermade music one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish, Tumult, son of Thunder, self exiled in upon his ego' (184.3-7). Chance within the poetic action plays the role of 'coincidance,' a chance which is accommodated within Joyce's designing or engineering, such as in Chamber Music or the Wake as 'chamber' (i.e., bedroom, the dream, and/or coition) 'made' (i.e., the poet as 'maker' and 'chambermaid'; i.e., Kate, the maid of the Earwickers as 'museumologist'). A theory of the poetic 'chaosmos' is about works counterpointing design and serendipity. The very opening of the Wake 'brings us back by a commodius vicus of recircu-

168 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics lation' (3.1-2), emphasizing the mystery of the circular nature of reasoning in modernity and its association with recursiveness of'strange loops,'15 which acts on both the self-reflexive nature of society's knowledge about itself and on aesthetic knowledge about the art of construction, the poetic. Episodes 1.5, the 'Mamafesta,' and III.3, 'The Inquest of Yawn,' are particularly involved with that interminably redoubled hermeneutic which is at the heart of all communication of social knowledge. Demonstrating the centrality of this poly-hermeneutic, the core of all communication of social knowledge, identifies Ulysses and the Wake as very early works of social science fiction. The 'hearasay in paradox lust' of the deconstructive 'dream monologue' and the reconstructive 'parapolylogue' result from Joyce's logical play with simultaneously multi-layered contrarieties that involve designing (engineering), ambiduality, and radical separation of time and space.

13 The Relativities of Light, Colour, and Sensory Perception

Physics, mathematics, mechanics, and optics are important in two crucial and adjacent passages in the fourth and final book of the Wake, which takes place at dawn. These key passages immediately precede the two concluding segments of book IV: (1) the final and only full version of Anna Livia's letter, several partial versions of which have already appeared; and (2) her final dramatic soliloquy - just as in Ulysses, where science, technology, and the mechanical movement of the catechetical style of 'Ithaca' immediately precede Molly's final soliloquy. In both works a fusion of science, technology, and mythopoeia, which is present from the opening to the concluding pages, provides the supplementary foundation for their intense exploration of lived experience. That same fusion also provides the means for exploring the nature of the contemporary urban society, and its transformation of and by the people who inhabit it. The Wake even extends this fusion into what Joyce called his 'history of the world,' which explores the millennial potentiality for a new awakening of 'the people.' This chapter will further explore how Finnegans Wake is a revolutionary book which encompasses new technological modes of production and dissemination and the new physics and mathematics. In the conclusion of the Wake, Joyce relates the whole problem of what he once called the 'mysteries of consciousness' to the problem of colour and the ambivalence of colour perception, which relates in a strange way to the uncertainty (or complementarity) principle that is central to the quantum theory of light. The grand finale of this imaginary night world is also a parodic Viconian ricorso through which the action only comes to a temporary conclusion to begin again at the opening pages. At one level of the action, that finale takes place during the closing ceremonies of the Easter Vigil just before sunrise on Easter morning. Including the Easter Vigil within the Wake permits Joyce to evoke that feast's associations with resurrection (sacrifice and sacrament), insurrection (the Easter Rebel-

170

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

lion and revolution), and erection (fertility, the rebirth of nature, and also the activity of construction). Joyces insistence on interweaving the world of mythology, liturgy, and religion with that of history and everyday life is particularly dominant in book IV, even though it has been a major thematic aspect throughout the work. That insistence is an ecumenical and cross-cultural blending of pagan and Christian, the Old and the New World, the gnostic and the agnostic, aboriginal and modern, the East and the West. The pagan roots that Joyce found in the blessing of the fire and water at the Easter Vigil complement the Egyptian Book of Coming Forth by Day as a pre-Christian liturgy of rebirth. The forth book, the only book to be comprised of a single chapter, opens with a radio apparently broadcasting the Sanctus from the Mass, with which the Preface to the Prayers of Consecration ends. The Mass can be considered as a drama with the Consecration constituting its climax. This allusion to Catholic liturgy is melded into equally dominant liturgical allusions to Buddhism, for in Sanskrit 'Sandhyas' means a 'twilight period, a period of junction,' as well as referring to 'the daily prayers recited at dawn, noon, sunset and midnight' (see 593.1). The thrice-repeated 'Sandhyas,' besides referring to twilight as a period of junction Osandhi'), also refers to the period between millennia (the twentieth century as the twilight before the dawning of the third millennium in 2000) and to an insurrection as a dawning of a revolution. Through the Buddhistic term blending with 'Sanctus,' the words thrice-repeated at the beginning of the Prayers of Consecration during the celebration of the Mass now proclaim the secularization of sacrament, for as announced at the opening of the Wake, 'Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish' (4.15-17).1 The awakening of book IV is in part that 'secular finish,' that 'secular resurrection,' and that 'secular revolution.' So this finale of the Wake begins with an interweaving of Western (Hebraic and Catholic) and Eastern (Egyptian and Buddhistic) motifs that continue to unfold throughout the section and which epitomize the interplay of mythico-religious with techno-scientific elements throughout the dream: Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne. Array! Surrection! Eireweeker to the wohld bludyn world. O rally, O rally, O rally! Phlenxty, O rally! To what lifelike thyne of the bird can be. Seek you somany matters. Haze sea east to Osseania. Here! Here! (593.1-6) This cry of 'Sanctus' is mediated technologically by an electro-mechanical device, a radio, perhaps even a police radio, which carries the ritual message followed by an equally ritualistic, 'Calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne. Array! Surrection!' Joyce introduces the stuff of popular culture and technology into this

Relativities of Light, Colour, and Sensory Perception

171

opening, for this 'Calling all downs' echoes the ever-familiar cry of films, broadcast drama, and popular novels - 'Calling all cars!' - in a cry again repeated shortly after as 'Calling all daynes. Calling all daynes to dawn' (593.11). This police alarm is followed by references to international news agencies, such as Tass, Havas, and Reuters, and to advertising slogans, such as 'genghis is ghoon for you' (593.17-18) which merges the ad 'Guinness is good for you' (an oft-repeated motif in the Wake}2 with a reference to the Thimble Theater comic strip ('Alice the Goon').3 The dawning of day becomes the symbol for all new beginnings, this in itself being a cliche" and an archetype just as much as the ad slogans and other pop and mass culture allusions. 'Sandhyas, sandhyas, sandhyas' is a wake-up call for the cars to investigate an apprehended insurrection, but, employing paronomasia, it also intermixes announcements of male erotic arousal, the erecting of buildings and other structures, revolution, and resurrection. There is a strong hint of a Nietzschean 'surerection' (a muted playing with the French sur in superman, surhomme, the emergence of the Nietzschean overman) and specific reference to Easter, the Feast of the Resurrection, for the Irish insurrection of 1916, which led to the beginnings of the Republic in 1922 (the year Joyce started the Wake), took place on Easter Monday, 1916. Throughout the Wake, as we have seen, Easter imagery associated with an Irish wake is a major structural aspect, and its associations with the triduum, the three nights and days leading up to the Easter Vigil, provides another of its themes. The importance of the triduum to Joyce, who usually attended the services on these days, even after he had rejected Catholicism, has been noted and compared with Freud's fascination with this period of the Catholic liturgy. At one level, the Wake is the three-day-long dark night marked by the nightly Tenebrae, 'the tenebrous Tune page of the Book ofKells (122.23), or 'the Blue Book of Eccles, Edition des ttriebres (179.27) - for while Latin, tenebrae, means 'obscure' or the 'darkness of night,' the word was also used as the title for the singing from the Holy Office of the next day's Matin and Lauds on Wednesday to Friday night of Holy Week (that is, the Matin and Lauds for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil). This is the period during which the Church went into deep mourning, leading to the elimination of any holy light and the removal of the Hosts from the Tabernacle of the main altar.4 The Wake specifically mentions the triduum (the 'triduum of Saturnalia' [97.33], 'a triduum before Our Larry's own day' [517-35], uses Tenebrae imagery, and borrows many themes from the Masses of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil on Saturday, and Dawn on Easter Sunday. That specific aspects of this liturgy of the Easter Vigil play a central role in the Wake has been noted in a previous chapter, for the phrase 'Ofelix culpa comes from the Exsultet, which is sung at the Easter Vigil while the holy fire, the paschal candle, is being lit.6

172 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics Beside the liturgical and recent historical associations, the Easter motif is associated with the historic ecclesiastical controversy between the Celtic rite and Rome about the date of Easter - 'this two caster island' (188.10) - a phrase which also suggests further association with Easter Island in the Pacific off the South American coast and thus with Polynesia. This Oceanic association should be related to the contemporary fascination among avant-garde artists with the mystery of the sacred megalithic statues of Easter Island erected by its original population, all of whom have disappeared, and the importance of the art of the later Polynesian settlers, particularly their sculpture. Danis Rose has noted a further Oceanic reference of importance in that the opening of the fourth book is replete with references to New Ireland, not only because of its name, but because at the time statues were being erected by its Melanesian inhabitants, they were at an early stage of development which could be equated with the dawn of civilization. Announcements of the awakening from the dream world in book IV are made by both ancient and modern modes of audiovisual communication: bells and the illumination of stained glass; radio, film, comics, ads, and television. Communication is a central concern for Joyce, because he has been designing a communicating machine, a machine by which the production(s) of its consumers becomes the production of the machine. When Deleuze speaks of transversality and communication in discussing Proust in Proust and Signs? readers of Joyce, whom Deleuze mentions in this discussion, have even greater justification for relating his writing to transversality and communication. Depth of communication, though certainly not immediacy or lucidity, thrives on complexity. Joyce plays on this theme in his conclusion with his use of the stained-glass triptych. The complexity of the signs created by the mosaic are achieved by the mechanics of the light of the sun playing through the complex surface of stained glass. As Panofsky noted, this phenomenon governs High Gothic architecture, recapitulating a principle of transparency which parallels the theology of High Scholasticism being governed by a principle of manifestatio or clarification.8 This triptych, already mentioned as being located in the chapel across from the Earwickers' inn in Chapelizod, is anagrammatically associated with the protagonist and his wife through the way that their two sets of initials, HCE and ALP, when combined produce the word 'chapel,' as well as the first two syllables of Chapelizod. Light, as a physical phenomenon closely associated by modern physics with electromagnetism and atomic structure, is an important contemporary symbol as well as a symbol from that 'ancient legacy of the past,' the 'sundance.' The CHAPEL will be illuminated because light is both wave-like (ALP) and pulse-like (HCE), just as that body-mind complex, the intellect, is also illuminated by wave-like phenomena and pulse-like phenomena. The three panes of the triptych in the dream depict, first, the Irish hermit of Glendalough, Saint Kevin; second, the debate of Saint Patrick with the Archdruid

Relativities of Light, Colour, and Sensory Perception

173

before the High King; and third, Saint Lawrence O'Toole, the patron saint of Dublin, who as Bishop of Dublin in 1172(?) assisted Henry II of England in occupying Ireland on the grounds that he would be a defender of the [Catholic] faith. The crucial importance to the structure of the Wake of the events depicted by two of these panels is indicated by the fact that they constitute the earliest manuscript text of two of the prototypical vignettes with which Joyce probably began his writing of the Wake — the legend of Saint Kevin and the debate between Saint Patrick and the Druidic sage. The three panels are associated with aspects of light and colour that culminate in a debate about the nature of light and the subsequent brief illumination of the third window with which the triptych section concludes. In the first half of this century, the dominant theory of colour reception continued to be related to that theory originally articulated by Thomas Young in the first years of the nineteenth century. Young had posited that there were three sets of receptors involved in the perception of light — one for each of blue, green, and violet. One panel of the triptych, then, is associated primarily with each of these three colours. The first window of the triptych, Saint Kevin, is associated with violet, 'the novend iconostase of his bluegreyned vitroils but begins in feint to light his legend' (603.34-6), for the translucent sulphates of iron (green) and copper (blue) involve the violet and blue receptors in the eye's perception of colour. The second, the Archdruid and Saint Patrick, is primarily associated with green (611.27-612.15), but since it is the centrepiece of the triptych, it is also associated with the rainbow and spectrum and with black, white, and the grey scale. The third, Saint Lawrence O'Toole, is associated with red (613.1-4) and with gold, which involves the red and green nerve fibres. It should also be noted that the movement as dawn approaches is from the less brilliant to the more brilliant, or from the violet end to the red end of the spectrum. Joyce is obviously playing both on the three primary colours - red, green, and violet or blue - and on the three distinct sets of rods and cones with which the the eye is provided for the perception of colour: red, green, and violet receptors. This latter allusion to the three sets of receptors is confirmed by the appearance in this passage of a reference to the name of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821—94) ('hemhaltshealing' [611.28]), one of the intellectual giants of nineteenth-century physics and physiology. Helmholtz's Popular Scientific Lectures (1881) had situated Young's theory of the three different systems of nerve fibres in the mainstream, and his Physiological Optics remained the basic text in the first third of the twentieth century. As book IV unfolds, Joyce expands the discussion of colour with references to the spectrum, Berkeley's theory of vision, Goethe's colour theory, the grey scale, and contemporary artistic practice. Bishop, in a chapter of Joyces Book of the Dark entitled 'Meoptics,' by painstakingly analysing the problem of 'seeing,' has

174 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics unequivocally shown the importance of light, colour, and optical theory to the Wake. From the opening pages there are particular references to rainbows associated with the figure of HCE's daughter, Izzy, as a rain cloud, as well as references to electro-mechanical and electro-chemical processes. In the second paragraph of I.I, for example, from the remark that 'Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface' (3.13—14), it is possible to imagine the arc light illuminating the brewery, but also causing the brewing of 'a peck of pa's malt' to be reflected in rainbow-like colours on the surface of the river. Joyce adds a neat comic touch to the arc light in the Wake since he was aware that an arc light was the major source of illumination in moving-picture projectors. So a passage about the Arklow lighthouse - 'arcglow's seafire siemens lure and wextward warnerforth's hookercrookers' (245.8-9) - suggests not only that it had been equipped by Siemens Engineering, but that this lighthouse with its arc light may also be imagined to be a film projector projecting a Warner Brothers film. Since everything in the Wake is filtered through HCE's night-time experience of dream, hallucination, and meditation, he is compared to a device performing crystalline spectroscopy: 'like a heptagon crystal emprisons trues and fauss for us' (127.3—4 Fr.,fousse = false). According to Joyce, the Easter Vigil celebrated the rebirth of fire and water. The first pane of the triptych to be illuminated celebrates water, for Saint Kevin, the hermit who lived seven years alone at Glendalough spending his nights in a stone hive and his days in a hollow tree by the edge of the lake, 'meditated continuously with seraphic ardour the primal sacrament of baptism or the regeneration of all man by affusion of water' (606.10-12). The portrait of Kevin is arithmetically assembled, being constructed in a ninefold series of concentric circles - 'ninthly enthroned, in the concentric centre of the translated water' (606.3-4).10 Furthermore, the portrait is permeated with sets of twos, threes, fives, sevens, and nines, stressing the mechanistic and insular nature of Kevin's theology (Kevin is called 'doctor insularis' [606.7]). The sets of sevens, for example, include the seven Holy Orders, the seven sacraments, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, the seven states of beatification, and the seven liturgical colours. The first to be illuminated and the first to fade into shadow, the predominant colours are from the blue-violet end of the spectrum, Kevin being seen in his bathtub 'when violet vesper vailed' (606.4). If Kevin as the first panel of the triptych celebrates water, Saint Lawrence O'Toole in the third panel celebrates fire, with red and gold colours predominating: 'Good safe firelamp! hailed the heliots. Goldselforelump!' (613.1). The second and central panel of the triptych deals with light, divine and natural, and the accompanying effects of colour by depicting the legendary debate between Saint Patrick and the Archdruid before the High King at Tara in 432. Joyce wrote to Budgen: 'Much more is intended in the colloquy between Berkeley the arch druid

Relativities of Light, Colour, and Sensory Perception

175

and his pidgin speech and Patrick the [?] and his Nippon English. It is also the defence and indictment of the book itself, B's theory of colours and Patricks practical solution to the problem.'11 Their debate is about light both as a neurophysiological phenomenon and as epiphany, the light of quantum theory and the light of grace (e.g., 'the twelfth day Pax and Quantum Wedding' [508.6]). Since 'sifted science will do your arts good' (440.19-20), quantum theory blends with optics, neurology, philosophy, theology, and poetics. In this part of the dream, which takes place as the dreamer is trying to arise and escape from the night world back to the waking world of the new day, Patrick in the presence of the High King defends his right to have lighted and blessed the new sacred fire on Easter eve, which the Archdruid disputes in the interests of the 'old religion,' defending an edict which banned any fires being lit except the High King's royal fire at Slane.12 In this debate, the two figures - Patrick and the Archdruid - embody two conflicting aspects of HCE's psyche, the Archdruid being an Irish magus (a Shemtype), and Patrick, a pragmatic, proselytizing Christian missionary invader from overseas (a Shaun-type). The story on the surface is about Patrick, who, through dialectic, diplomatic, eloquent, and demonstrative interaction,13 argues that he has the right to light the sacred fire as part of the celebration of the Easter Vigil. The story also contributes to Joyce's allegorical treatment of the nature of light and colour. His treatment of the complex nature of light in this debate is enmeshed in and resolved by an awareness of its scientific, technological, cultural, and practical aspects, for it involves Enlightenment philosophy, nineteenth- and twentiethcentury physics and optics, perceptual psychology, and the mythological role of light in pagan and Christian times. The immediate lead-up to the debate starts with the rising of the sun blending with Patricks defiant lighting of the fire: 'When the messanger of the risen sun ... shall give to every seeable a hue and to every hearable a cry and to each spectacle his spot and to each happening her houram. The while we, we are waiting, we are waiting for. Hymn' (609.20-3). A third Mutt-and-Jeff-style conversation precedes the debate (the first having been the encounter of Mutt and Jute in the opening chapter, and the second the televized fight between Butt and Taff in II.3), in which Muta (Change + Mute) and Juva (Youth + Help, Aid + Jove) treat this coming event as a major news story or sports spectacular. That conversation begins with a query by Muta about the fire or light that is appearing: 'Quodestnunc fumusiste volhvuns ex Domoyno?' (609.24; 'What now is that smoke rolling out of the Lord?' or, as O'Hehir notes, pointing out the pun in 'Domoyno' - 'out of the house of wine'),15 to which Juva replies that it is the smoke from Saint Patricks holy fire. They discuss Patrick's defiance and the appearance of the king, size up the debaters, bet on the coming event, and implicitly comment on the book itself. During their vaudeville-like conversation, there is a key exchange about the

176 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics book - alluded to as 'wolk in process' (609.31). In this part of their dialogue, which was one of Joyce's late additions to the Muta-Juva conversation in the manuscripts, Juva's commenting on the High King's having hedged his bets on the coming event with half a crown on both Patrick ('the Eurasian Generalissimo' [610.12-13]) and the Archdruid ('the burkely buy' [610.12]) causes Muta to respond that the High King, 'the twyly velleid' (veiled in twilight but truly valid), is 'paridicynical' (610.14-15), a cynic and sceptic (perhaps pursuing the deistic scepticism of Nicholas of Cusa's doctor ignorantia) about paradise. Juva's response is that in order for the book, its cyclical nature, and the revolution to succeed ('Ut vivat volumen' [L., volumen = book, revolution, and a cyclical turning]), let paradise be lost ('sic pereat pouradosus') (610.15). This gives final confirmation to Joyce's revolutionary book, cynical and sceptical about paradise, being a sacramentalization of the secular or, as the opening implied, leading to a 'secular phoenish.' Immediately following the conclusion of this burlesque comic strip (Mutt and Jeff), just as the debate is about to begin, and introduced by an allusion to an audiovisual, media-oriented scene of news and entertainment coverage of the event - 'Shoot' (610.33) - there appears a medley of motifs associated with communication, media, and popular culture: conversation, with its gossip and rumour; the televizing of a spectacle ('Rhythm and Colour at Park Mooting. Peredos Last in the Grand Natural. Velivision victor' [610.34-5]); journalism and theatrics ('Dubs newstage oldtime turftussle' [610.35-6]); and animated comics, blended with Caesar's 'Veni, vidi, vici!' and an allusion to the Widger family associated with racing — 'Winny Willy Widger' (610.36). 'Paddrock' (paddock + pad + rock + Patrick) as common-sense realist and religious apologist argues with 'bookley' (611.2), the bookish and hermetic Archdruid. This encounter is embedded in everyday techno-culture as well as in the theosophical, theological, poetic, and philosophic, for the figure of Bishop Berkeley as an aspect of the Archdruid encompasses all of these arts and sciences, particularly with relation to theories of vision and perception that underlie the role of light in the ensuing debate. The encounter begins with a time word, 'Tune' (611.4), while the first word of the following paragraph is a space word, 'Punc' (L., punctum = point), to suggest the flow of time and location in space respectively. Moreover, beginning with 'Tune' also alludes to the Book of Kelts, which is a metonymy for the book that is the Wake since it has already been called the 'book of kills' (482.33). This not only associates the Archdruid with the illuminators who crafted that book, but simultaneously reinforces the central importance of light and colour to the construction of the Wake. The complex design and colour of the Tune page of the Book ofKells involve the entire spectrum, with the more brilliant golds and greens predominating, the same colours that surface elsewhere in this encounter. 'Tune' and 'punc,' which relate

Relativities of Light, Colour, and Sensory Perception

177

back to the previously examined space-time motifs and allusions to quantum theory, reappear later in the description of'Iro's Irismans ruinboon pot' (612.20—1), in which there are references to time, complementarity (i.e., the uncertainty principle), the neuronic bombardment of the atom ('neutrolysis ... eruberuption'), probability, and colour (L, virid, green, and L., rubeo, red): 'for beingtime monkblinkers timeblinged completamentarily murkblankered in their neutrolysis between the possible viriditude of the sager and the probable eruberuption of the saint' (612.21-4). Quantum mechanics and relativity theory are playfully associated with neuro-physiological and psychological perception of colour because of the radical relativity and uncertainty involved in the perception of colour. Glasheen has suggested that the reference to 'Entis-Onton' when the Archdruid is described as the 'numpa one puraduxed seer in seventh degree of wisdom of Entis-Onton' (611.19-20) is to Einstein-Newton.17 This introduces Newton, one of the originators of contemporary colour theory and wave theory, and Einstein, who in developing the general theory of relativity queried fundamental aspects of Newtonian theory — a suggestion that is reinforced by 'beingtime' and 'timeblinged' (612.21). The phrase 'Entis-Onton' also relates to other aspects of the passage: associations of the Archdruid with the hermetic motifs of the Wake; the problem of being and time in contemporary philosophy; poetic traditions of the Celts through allusions to the 'seven degrees of wisdom' emblematized in the 'septicoloured mantle' (611.6); flashbacks to the Kevin portrait with its patterns of sevens. The reference to Einstein contextualizes the philosophical, theological, and poetic implications within some principle of relativity, which itself provides a figural comment on the perception of colour. The probability of interpreting 'Entis-Onton' as including a reference to Einstein is reinforced by Einstein's contribution to understanding the photoelectric effect and his identification of the photon as the quantum of light. In an earlier discussion, Professor Jones talks of 'Winestainf's]' theories and how they raise further questions of'quality' and 'tality': (a) the problem of the quantum theory; and (b) the conflict between Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, for 'tality' suggests 'haecceitas,' thisness - a supposition confirmed when in the next paragraph Patrick alludes to the Archdruid as 'whackling it out ... thiswis (612.16—18; my italics). The connection between contemporary physicists and medieval schoolmen has to do with their differing interests in light and colour. Joyce is interested in light and the ambivalence of colour perceptually, physically, psychologically, and semiotically, extrapolating from that to the ambivalence of all materials which people use as signs in communicating for book IV has declared at the outset: 'To what lifelike thyne of the bird can be. Seek you somany matters' (593.4—5; thine + sign + bird [phoenix] + bard + Moore's song 'What Life like That of the Bard Can Be'). Since the debate will conclude with the rainbow as the archetype of 'the sound

178

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

sense sympol,' let us further trace through this dense, cryptic, enigmatic debate to other points involving colour and light. The debate is introduced by a reference to the pervasive colourfulness of the illuminations in The Book of Kelts, which is immediately followed by the hermetic colourfulness of the Archdruid clothed in 'his heptachromatic sevenhued septicoloured roranyellgreenlindigan mantle' (611.6) - a post-Christian colourfulness is combined with a pre-Christian colourfulness, playing on the way that Christianity absorbed the pre-Christian (such as the Druidic) in keeping with Joyces interpretation of the Easter Vigil. 'Balkelly['s]' resplendent, priestly 'mantle' is in sharp contrast to Patrick's white 'alb' (611.7) and monkish 'cassock' (611.8) of'greysfriaryfamily' (611.8; i.e., Franciscans or grey friars). This introduces the counterpointing of the colour spectrum and the levels of intensity of the grey scale, which will be adapted to a 'green' scale in the differing levels of intensity in the description of the High King. It is important to note that, to take full advantage of the semiotic complexity of expression and communication, this discussion of colour and light is supplemented with references to speech, sound, and rhythm. Patrick, whose throat hum with of sametime' (611.8), hums in a monotone, but Patrick is also silent for 'he drink up words' (611.11) in the presence of the Archdruid's 'speeching' (611.10), and ultimately he will use gestures, kinaesthetic movements, and material signs to communicate. After developing his theory of the epiphany in Stephen Hero, Joyce used the word only once in his published writings (in Ulysses as Stephen reminisces, 'Remember your epiphanies written on green and leaves ...' [ £73.141]) until Finnegans Wake, where it appears three times: once as the word 'epiphany' - 'How culious an epiphany' (508.11); once in a proper name, Father Epiphanes (341.27); and then in a series of transformations in this debate on colour, light, and the book itself. It should be remembered that the development of the epiphany goes back to a manuscript in which Joyce also first developed concepts of 'the modern' and of Vivisection,' which are concepts germane to a discussion of Joyce and techno-culture. Still more striking, his prime example of epiphany in Stephen's discussion with Cranly in the Stephen Hero manuscript has to do with looking at the ballast clock: 'This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.' When 'Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office' clock, Stephen explains, 'I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany' (5//211). If epiphany is linked, on the one hand, to Joyces modern and technological interests, on the other, it is linked back to his preoccupation with Aquinas's pronouncements on beauty, and particularly with his interpretation of the third of these qualities, claritas.

Relativities of Light, Colour, and Sensory Perception

179

Umberto Eco has shown how Aquinas's sense of the term claritas would naturally have associated it with colour, for he had inherited a long tradition to that effect.18 But, as Eco argues, Aquinas radically modified that theory of claritas; he concludes that adhering to the spirit of the Thomist system results in this definition: 'Clarity is the fundamental communicability of form, which is made in relation to someone's looking at or seeing of the object' (italics are Eco's). This certainly appears to be consistent with Joyce's conclusion that 'claritas is quidditas,'20 except that the specific emphasis on particularity which Joyce gives in his discussion moves closer to Duns Scotus's conception of haecceitas or hecceity. If, as a note in the notebooks seems to suggest, the passage in the Wake is not only Saint Patrick versus the Archdruid, but Saint Thomas versus Scotus,21 then the ambivalence of Joyce's final interpretation of the epiphany and its connection with complementarity is at the heart of the issue. In the Patrick-Archdruid debate, the term 'epiphany' occurs when the Archdruid tells Patrick about 'all too many much illusiones through photoprismic velamina of hueful panepiphanal world spectacurum' (611.12-13). This neatly joins the dramatic notion of 'spectaculum' with the electromagnetic spectrum that produces the range of colours, which is 'hueful' because light composed of vibrations of a single wavelength in the visible spectrum differs qualitatively from light of another wavelength. This qualitative difference is perceived subjectively as hue. The 'photoprismic' event creates a veiling ('velamina') that is the source of many illusions because the hues are the reflected, unabsorbed wavelengths of light and because they are perceived differently by different viewers, so that a 'panepiphanal world' is naturally a world of 'all too many much illusiones.' People cannot confront the 'solar light' directly, so that they are only able to perceive 'under but one photoreflection of the several iridals gradationes of solar light' (611.16—17) that tend to transform the 'hueful panepiphanal world' deceptively to the 'furnit of [the] heupanepi world' (611.18) or 'part of fur of huepanwor' (611.18-19). Joyce then plays triply on epiphany, light, and scholastic theology, for while 'fallen man' can only grasp the reflections, 'numpa one puraduxed seer in seventh degree of wisdom of Entis-Onton' is illuminated by the inner light, that is, 'he savvy true inwardness of reality, the Ding hvad in idself id est,'22 a phrase which partly plays with the formula for what constitutes an epiphany in Stephen Hero: '... we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany' (5//213). But as this occurs, the objects ('obs of epiwo') are of a world much reduced in richness ('panepiwor'). The pure leader paradoxically sees more and less, for while the objects 'allside showed themselves in trues coloribus resplendent with sextuple gloria of light actually retained' (611.23-5; sextuple not heptachromatic,

180

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

for he sees the remaining light that is absorbed without the reflected one), the point being that the 'puraduxed seer' seems to see only what is absorbed, not what is reflected - 'untintus' (one tint + no tint + L., within + in + us) — a fact quickly illustrated by seeing the gold and red of the High King Leary as shades on a scale of green. The 'true inwardness of reality' is ensnared in a Freudian 'id.' This intermingling of scholastic, gnostic, idealistic, and scientific language is essential to Joyce's treatment of light in the contemporary electromagnetic world. Scholastic terms that are present include 'clarity' ('claractinism') and 'resplendence' ('trues colouribus resplendent'), though both are interwoven with other implications. For example, 'actinism' is an archaic term for 'the philosophy of radiant heat and light.' 'Radiance,' 'resplendence,' and 'clarity' are all related to early Joycean discussions of epiphany and of Thomistic and other scholastic theories of beauty. But when Joyce plays Scotus against Aquinas, and Enlightenment idealist against a traditional realist, his apparent dyad is really, as the triptych would suggest, a triad, the resolution of which is the pre-eminence of contemporary physics and mathematics in the new techno-culture. If in contrast to the Archdruid, Patrick is 'ontesantes, twotime hemhaltshealing' (611.28) — realistically oriented because his realistic perspective blends modernity with the physical optics of Helmholtz — the 'panepiphanal world' is the ambivalent merging of a pragmatic new scholasticism, a theory of physics, a psychology of perception, a popular techno-culture, and the art of colour and light. The 'panepiphanal world' of'iridal gradationes' is the world that will actually manifest itself as the sun rises and the solar light shows forth its golden and fiery glory. Ironically, the High King perceived in the scale of greens by the Archdruid is observed as 'pure hueglut intensely saturated' (612.13), with reference to the two qualitative differences — hue and saturation — and the one quantitative difference, intensity or brilliance. But with the shades of green, the hue is neither consistently pure nor saturated — in fact, it is kind of a chiaroscuro in green rather than black and white. Berkeley is like Patrick, the 'pore shiroskuro blackinwhitepaddyanger,' which becomes the apparent reality, the differences in light and dark and thus intensity. But Patrick also is associated with physics, and the ultimate outcome of the debate in the Wake, as opposed to that in 432, results in a victory neither for him nor for the Archdruid. When Patrick alludes to the Archdruid as whackling it out ... thiswis aposterioprismically apatstrophied and paralogically periparolysed' (612.16-20), it echoes an earlier declaration that while the 'dream monologue was over,' the 'drama parapolylogic had yet to be' (474.4-5). The Archdruid's empirically grounded deduction from the spectral effect, which nevertheless is articulated digressively, generates the non-sense, paradox, and contradictions which constitute his mystical and mathematical hermenuetics (that is, 'paralogically periparolysed' interpretation, where 'periparolysed' = 'secret undoing all around')2 arising from

Relativities of Light, Colour, and Sensory Perception

181

the ambivalence of verbal, visual, and oral perception. Colour becomes the index of a chaosmos that is the world of dream, hallucination, and illusion, which the rock-like common sense of Patrick strives with only partial success to undermine even though colour is also based on principles of mechanics, optics, and electromagnetism that are the province of engineers and scientists. While partly alluding to Joyces lifetime battle with glaucoma, the technicalia of the eye utilized in this passage are also part of the techno-analytic way that Joyce has consistently approached physico-photochemical processes and their relation to the body as mechanism. Absorption, 'absorbere,' for example, is a technical colour term, since objects become coloured by absorbing some wavelengths of white light while reflecting others; hence, 'photoreflection' (611.19). Patrick, then, is the 'pore shiroskuro blackinwhitepaddynger' (612.18), alternately absorbing all the light waves (i.e., black) or reflecting them (i.e., white), who 'refrect[s],' refracts, as well as reflects (612.16). There is a conscious play throughout the Archdruid-Patrick encounter between 'solar light' and the Catholic concept of God, for Patrick trumps the Archdruid by genuflecting to 'Balenoarch' (an anagram of It., arcobaleno) — the rainbow created by the rising sun as 'the sound sense sympol in a weedwayedwold of the firethere the sun in his halo cast. Onmen' (612.29-30; the Catholic sign of the cross: 'firethere' as Father, 'sun' as Son, and 'halo cast' as Holy Ghost, with 'onmen' as Amen). As the light moves to the third panel of the triptych, Patrick and the Archdruid are merging — just as Patrick absorbed much of the old religion into Ireland's new Christianity. As they merge, the green-oriented Archdruid and the red-oriented Patrick produce as an additive effect yellow or gold, but this merger is complexly hedged in the physical theories, for the time-oriented Archdruid ('tune') is joined to the space-oriented Patrick ('punc') as 'beingtime monkblinkers timeblinged completamentarily murkblankered in their neutrolysis.' Joyce, playing with terms from physics to coin 'neutrolysis' — he joins 'neutron' and 'electrolysis,' while paradoxically overlayering the sense of 'neutral' — toys with a kind of fission consistent with 'abnihilisation of the etym' (so the saint will 'eruberupt'!). He further, 'completamentarily' (612.21), plays with the various senses of'completes' and 'complement' as well as the complementarity principle associated with quantum dynamics. What is primarily at stake here is the crossing of contemporary physics with philosopho-theological speculation to explore the question of 'sound sense sympol [s].' 'Epiphany,' as involved in this passage, connects with an earlier occurrence of epiphany in the Wake (III.3) where it is associated with the excremental nature of the world. The play on epiphany throughout Berkeley's part of the debate, which stresses the concept of epiphany as the bridge between poetics and technoculture, prepares for the dropping of a turd, the Archdruid's satiric epiphanic reply to the saint (or vice versa) that echoes the earlier pun on HCE as Hercules cleans-

182 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics ing the Aegean stables,25 'How culious an epiphany,' (508.11), so that the conclusion of this climactic encounter neatly reinforces the excrementitious nature of art as epiphany: That was thing, bygotter, the thing, bogcotton, the very thing, begad! Even to uptoputty Bilkilly-Belkelly-Balkally. Who was for shouting down the shatton on the lamp of Jeeshees. Sweating on to stonker and throw his seven. As he shuck his thumping fore features apt the hoyhop of His Ards. Thud. (612.31-6)

Ards' links arts to arse just before the body or blow falls or the turd drops. It should also be noted that 'hoyhop' and 'ards' span the transcendent and the excrementitious. 'Hoyhop' echoes the Danish, Hojhed = highness, but it also suggests the 'hewhaw' of an ass. Ards' echoes 'arts' but also suggests both the beast of burden and the human ass. The Apollonian portrait of the ascetic, celibate Kevin is undermined by the earthly resolution in tactility and excrement of the debate of saint and sage. This rerun of Buckley shooting the Russian general because he spies the general shitting, transversally relates to other droppings in the Wake, including the book itself as a 'mudmound.' The Feast of the Epiphany, after which Joyce's ephiphany is named, is a feast rooted in the ancient mysteries — essentially it is the feast of the manifestation of the Incarnation, but epiphany as a term had originally referred to the moment in which a deity manifested her/himself. In the vision of book IV, the entire world, glorious and excrementitious - the 'hueful panepiphanal world spectacurum of Lord Joss' — exists for communication: first, to communicate the presence of the world of Lord Joss to 'everybody'; second, to allow intercommunication within the world; third, to permit communication with the world of Lord Joss. (Though Joss stands for God in pidgin Chinese - 'Joss-el-Jovan' [472.15] - in Wakese it also can stand for 'josser' [109.3], 'a foolish or simple fellow,' and may also be related to 'josher' and 'josh' — for 'in the beginning there was the gest.') As the sun rises - 'Good safefirelamp!hailed the heliots' (613.1) - and the 'farbiger pancosmos' is seen in all its ambivalent glory, the third triptych is briefly illuminated: 'Lo, the laud of laurens now orielising benedictively when saint and sage have said their say' (613.15-16). Saint Lawrence O'Toole, patron saint of Dublin, whose heart is preserved in the Chapel of Saint Laud, Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, appears momentarily as illuminated by the sun-god (the Lord of Lawrence). This is an ambiguous illumination, for as Archbishop of Dublin in the twelfth century it was Lawrence O'Toole who persuaded capitulation to Henry II, thus delivering Ireland into the hands of England. As a civic and political figure and an Irish trimmer, he represents the opposite of Saint Kevin's mystical withdrawal.

Relativities of Light, Colour, and Sensory Perception

183

So the sun moves onto the land in a passage which is a medley of natural processes of life and death, of vegetation decaying and flowering, of'increasing, livivorous feelful thinkamalinks, luxuriotiating': A spathe of calyptrous glume involucrumines the perinanthean Amenta: fungoalgaceous muscafilicial graminopalmular planteon; of increasing, livivorous, feelful thinkamalinks; luxuriotiating everywhencewithersoever among skullhullows and charnelcysts of a weedwastewoldwevild when Ralph the Retriever ranges to jawrode his knuts knuckles and her theas thighs; one-gugulp down of the nauseous forere brarkfarsts oboboomaround and you're as paint and spickspan as a rainbow; wreathe the bowl to rid the bowel; no runcure, no rank heat, sir; amess in amullium; chlorid cup. (613.17-26)

The technicalia of ferns, fungi, flowers, and vegetation juxtaposed to the excrementitious, everyday world grounds the 'livivorous, feelful thinkamalinks' in a 'place of excrement,' preparing for the final version of Anna Livia's letter (615-19) and her closing soliloquy (6l9ff). As Anna points out in the letter, we have observed 'the secret workings of natures' (615.14) both in the microcosm of the dreamer and the macrocosm of the pancosmos of which the dreamer dreams. Life, like the light which enables it to be, is a machinic process. That process permits HCE's bodymind to produce imaginarily his night world with its dreams and hallucinations joined with the powerfully moving 'livivorous feelful thinkamalinks' of ALP's body-mind flowing like the river returning its waters to the sea, producing echoes of memory, millennia, and revelation: There's where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the (628.12-16)

14

Conclusion

As the twentieth century moves towards its conclusion and the beginning of the third millennium, Joyce's pre-millennial vision of the emergence of a unique culture, a cyberculture, becomes clearer. In much the same way that W.B. Yeats s 'The Second Coming' introduced pre-millennial motifs into mainline modernist poetry, and the speculation of science fiction writers and film-makers introduced them into the broader everyday culture, Joyce extrapolated from the changing sociocultural environment surrounding the cultural producer to anticipate entirely new, all-encompassing modes of cultural production, which, utilizing new technologies of production, reproduction, and distribution, would complement and supplement the traditional arts, and even the newer 'lively arts.' Vico's New Science provided a more intellectual version of the launching of a new era than the theosophy, gnosticism, and occultism of Yeats s A Vision or the cruder Spenglerian philosophy of history, while Nietzsche's declamation of the era of the 'over-man,' supplemented by socio-anarchistic thought, psychoanalytic discourse, and a transformation of modern thought by scientific theory, established a theoretical grounding for a new theorization of cultural production. Surrounded by European artistic communities fascinated by the new culture of space, time, and post-industrial technology, and by literary and artistic colleagues such as Sigfried Giedion, Paul Valery, Sergei Eisenstein, and Wyndham Lewis, Joyce, coming to Europe from a marginalized and colonialized, but historically rich, culture, was uniquely situated to read the significance of the preceding seven or eight decades of scientific and technological growth and transformation. Combining a sense of the Greco-Roman and Christian roots of European culture and a fascination with the newness of movies, comics, photogravure, and radio, linked to a naturally rebellious and anarchistic temperament, Joyce was able to perceive the awakening of a new world that he could simultaneously respond to as paradoxically Utopian and dystopian. Rightly or wrongly, he believed and could 'jocoseriously'

Conclusion

185

assert that the new assembler of cultural productions must encompass the applied science and mathematics of the engineer and the theoretical role of a postNietzschean 'philosophise' as well as the transformed roles of modern poet and music-maker. This permitted him to intuit the significance of how electrification and new modes of mathematical and mechanical analysis, combined with a world reduced in its sense of its own magnitude and forced to recognize its cultural diversity, would produce entirely new modes of expression and communication. Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy, a book which redirected the way that artists, critics, scholars, and communicators viewed the role of technological mediation in communication and expression, had its origin in McLuhan's desire to write a book to be called 'The Road to Finnegans Wake.' It has not been widely recognized just how important James Joyce's major writings were to McLuhan, or to other major figures (such as Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Lacan) who have written about aspects of communication involving technological mediation, speech, writing, and electronics. While all of these connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic, even if the least analytical, Joycean of them all, McLuhan, provides the most specific bridge linking the work of Joyce and his modernist contemporaries to the development of electric communication and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual reality. McLuhan's scouting of 'The Road to Finnegans Wake established him as the first major disseminator of those Joycean insights which have become the unacknowledged basis for our thinking about techno-culture, just as the pervasive McLuhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an unconscious one, of our verbal heritage. In the mid-1980s, William Gibson first identified the emergence of a new cyberculture, which he denominated cyberspace, as producing the most recent moments in the development of electro-mechanical communications, telematics, and artificial realities. Cyberspace, as Gibson described it, is the simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data: '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.'2 This 'consensual hallucination' produced by 'data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system' creates 'unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding.'3 Almost a decade earlier, McLuhan's remarks about computers (dating from the late 1970s) display some striking similarities: It steps up the velocity of logical sequential calculations to the speed of light reducing numbers to body count by touch ... It brings back the Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea

186 James Joyce's Techno-Poetics that 'numbers are all'; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy in favor of decentralization. When applied to new forms of electronic-messaging such as teletext and videotext, it quickly converts sequential alphanumeric texts into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging ideographic summation, like hieroglyphs.4

McLuhan's hieroglyphs certainly more than anticipate Gibsons iconics, and McLuhan s particular use of hieroglyph or iconology, like that of mosaic, primarily derives from Joyce and Giambattista Vico. It is not surprising, then, that McLuhan's works, side by side with those of Gibson, have been avidly read by early researchers in MIT's Media Lab and later inspired the launching of the former lab guru, Nicholas Negroponte's, magazine Wired, the commercial recorder of this new cyberculture,5 for these researchers had also conceived of an artificial reality composed, like the tribal and collective 'global village,' of'tactile, haptic, proprioceptive and acoustic spaces and involvements.'6 The experiments of the artistic avant-garde movements (such as the Dadaists, the Bauhaus, and the surrealists) and of individuals (such as Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Sergei Eisenstein, or Luis Bunuel) generated the exploration of the semiotics and technical effects of such spaces and involvements. Duchamp, for example, became an early leading figure in splitting apart the presumed generic boundaries of painting and sculpture to explore arts of motion, light, movement, gesture, and concept, exemplified in his Large Glass and the serial publication of his accompanying notes from The Box of 1914 through The Green Box to A I'infinitif. His interest in the notes as part of the total work echoes Joyces own interest in the publication of Work in Progress and commentaries he organized upon it (e.g., Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress). Joyce also explores similar aspects of motion, light, movement, gesture, and concept. So the road to MIT's Media Lab and cyberculture begins with poetic and artistic experimentation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; later, as Stuart Brand notes, many of the Media Lab researchers of the 1960s and 1970s placed great importance on collaboration with artists involved in exploring the nature and art of motion and in investigating new relationships between sight, hearing, and the other senses.8 Understanding the social and cultural implications of cyberculture, artificial realities, and digitilization of communication requires a radical reassessment of the interrelationships between Gibson s now commonplace description of cyberspace, McLuhan's modernist-influenced vision of the development of electric media, and the particular impact that Joyce had both on McLuhan's writings about electrically mediated communication and on the views of Borges, Cage, Derrida, Eco, and Lacan regarding problems of mediation and communication. Such a reassessment requires that two central issues be confronted: (1) the crucial nature of cybercul-

Conclusion

187

ture's challenge to the privileging of language through the orality/literacy dichotomization used by many theorists of language and communication; (2) the idea of artificial reality's presence as the super-medium that encompasses and transcends all media. The cluster of critics who have addressed orality and literacy, following the lead of Walter Ong, H.A. Innis, and Eric Havelock, have - like them - failed to comprehend the fact that McLuhan was disseminating a Joycean view which grounded communication in tactility, gesture, and central-nervous-system processes, rather than promulgating the emergence of a new oral/aural age, a secondary orality. This emphasis on the tactile, the gestural, and the play of the central nervous system in communication is a key to Joyces literary exploration of a theme he shared with his radical modernist colleagues in other arts who envisioned the eventual development of a coenaesthetic medium9 that would integrate and harmonize the effects of sensory and neurological information in currently existing and newly emerging art forms. Joyce s work should be recognized as pioneering the artistic exploration of two sets of differences - orality/literacy and print/(tele-)electric media - that have since become dominant themes in the discussion of these questions. Finnegans Wake is one of the first major poetic encounters with the challenge that electronic media present to the traditionally accepted relationships between speech, script, and print. (Ulysses also involves such an encounter, but at an earlier stage in the historic development of mediated communication.) The 'counter-poetic,' Finnegans Wake, provides one of the key texts regarding the problem presented by the dichotomization of the oral and the written and by its frequent corollary, a privileging of either speech or language. This enigmatic work is not only a polysemic, encyclopaedic book designed to be read with the simultaneous involvement of ear and eye: it is also a self-reflexive book about the role of the book in the electro-machinic world of the new technology. The Wake is the most comprehensive exploration, prior to the 1960s or 1970s, of the ways in which these new modes created a dramatic crisis for the arts of language and the privileged position of the printed book. The Wake dramatizes the necessary deconstruction and reconstruction of language in a world where multi-semic grammars and rhetorics, combined with entirely new modes for organizing and transmitting information and knowledge, eventually would impose a variety of new, highly specialized roles on speech, print, and writing. Joyce's selection of Vice's New Science as the structural scaffolding for the Wake - the equivalent of Homers Odyssey in Ulysses - underscores how his interest in the contemporary transformation of the book requires grounding the evolution of civilization in the poetics of communication, especially gesture and language, and the prophetic' role of the poetic in shaping the future. As the world awakens to the full potentialities for the construction of artefacts and processes of communication in the new electric cosmos, Joyce foresees the

188

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

transformation (not the death) of the book - going beyond the book as it had historically evolved. Confronted with this situation, Joyce seeks to develop a poetic language which will resituate the book within this new communicative cosmos, while simultaneously recognizing the drive towards the development of a theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium, a Virtual reality.' Since the action takes place in a dream world, Joyce can produce an impressively prophetic imaginary prototype for the virtual worlds of the future. His dream world envelops the reader within an aural sphere, accompanied by kinetic and gestural components that arise from effects of rhythm and intonation realized through the visual act of reading; but it also reproduces imaginarily the most complex multimedia forms and envisions how they will utilize his present, which will have become the past, to transform the future. As we have seen, the hero(ine)10 in the Wake, 'Here Conies Everybody,' is a communicating machine, 'this harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole),' an electric transmission-receiver system, an ear, the human sensorium, a presence 'eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes' (309.24-310.1). Joyce envisions the person as embodied within an electro-machinopolis (an electric, pan-global, machinic environment), which becomes an extension of the human body, an interior presence, indicated by a stress on the playfulness of the whole person and on tactility as calling attention to the interplay of sensory information within the electro-chemical neurological system. This medley of elements and concerns, focused on questioning the place of oral and written language in an electro-mechanical techno-culture that engenders more and more comprehensive modes of communication biased towards the dramatic, marks Joyce as a key figure in the prehistory of cyberculture. Acutely sensitive to the inseparable involvement of speech, script, and print with the visual, the auditory, the kinaesthetic, and other modes of expression, Joyce roots all communication in gesture. Gestures, like signals and flashing lights that provide elementary mechanical systems for communications, are 'words of silent power' CFW345.19). The originary nature of gesture (gest., Fr. geste = gesture) is linked with the mechanics of humour (i.e., jest) and to telling a tale (gest as a feat and a tale or romance). Since gestures, and ultimately all acts of communication, are generated from the body, the 'gest' as 'flesh-without-word' (FW468.5—6) is 'a flash' that becomes word and 'communicake[s] with the original sinse' (FW239.12). By treating the 'gest' as a bit (a bite), orality and the written word as projections of gesture can be seen to spring from the body as a communicating machine.11 The historical processes that contribute to the development of cyberspace augment the growing emphasis, in theories such as Kenneth Burke s, on the idea that the goal of the symbolic action called communication is secular, paramodern communion}2 The Wake provides a self-reflexive explanation of the communicative process of encoding and decoding required to interpret an encoded text, which itself is char-

Conclusion

189

acteristically mechanical: Joyce's practice and his theoretical orientation imply that as the road to cyberspace unfolds, the very nature of the word, the image, ,and the icon also changes. Under the impact of electric communication, it is once again clear that the concept of the word must embrace artefacts and events as well.13 Writing and speech are subsumed into entirely new relationships with non-phonemic sound, image, gesture, movement, rhythm, and all modes of sensory input, especially the tactile. To continue to speak about a dichotomy of orality versus literacy is a misleading over-simplification of the role that electric media play in this transformation, a role best comprehended through historical knowledge of the earliest stages of human communication where objects, gestures, and movements apparently intermingled with verbal and non-verbal sounds. Marschak's study of early cultural artefacts, the Aschers' discussion of the quipu, and Levi-Strauss s discussions of the kinship system demonstrate the relative complexity of some ancient non-linguistic systems of communication.14 Here Joyce s entire, schizoid prophetic vision of cyberculture seems somewhat Deleuzian. It is an ambivalent and critical vision, for the 'ambiviolence' of the 'langdwage' throughout the Wake implies critique as it unfolds this history, since Joyce still situates parody within satire. He does not free it from socio-political reference, as a free-floating 'postmodernist' play with the surface of signifiers would. This can be noted in the way that Joyce first probes what came to be one of the keystones of McLuhanism. Throughout the work, Joyce plays with spheres and circles, some of which parody one of the mystical definitions of God frequently attributed to Alan of Lille (Alanus de Insulis), but sometimes referred to as Pascal's sphere. Speaking of a daughter-goddess figure, he says: ... our Frivulteeny Sexuagesima to expense herselfs as sphere as possible, paradismic perimutter, in all directions on the bend of the unbridalled, the infinisissimalls of her facets becoming manier and manier as the calicolum of her umdescribables (one has thoughts of that eternal Rome) ... (298.27-33)

Here a sphere is imagined whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere, since it is infinitesimal and undescribable (though apparently the 'paradismic' perimeter is sexual), as the paradisal mother communicates herself without apparent limit. This is both an embodied and a disembodied sphere, polarizing and decentring the image so as to impede any closure. The same spherical principle is applied more widely to the presentation of the sense of hearing. The reception of messages by the protagonist of the Wake, '(Hear! Calls! Everywhair!)' (108.23), is accomplished by 'bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd' (309.22-4), a sphere, for it requires 'a gain control of circum-

190

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

centric megacycles' (310.7-8). It can truly be said of HCE, 'Ear! Ear! Weakear! An allness eversides!' (568.26),15 precisely because he is 'human, erring and condonable' (58.19), yet 'humile, commune and ensectuous' (29.30), suffering many deprivations his 'hardest crux ever' (623.33; emphasis mine in these and the following quotations in this paragraph). Though 'humbly to fall and cheaply to rise, [this] exposition of failures' (589.17), living with 'Heinz cans everywhere' (581.5), still protests his fate, 'making use of sacrilegious languages to the defect that he would challenge their hemosphores to exterminate them' (81.25) by decentring or dislocating any attempts to enclose him. This discussion of a sphere and of hearing critically anticipates what McLuhan later called 'acoustic space' - a fundamental cyberspatial conception with its creation of multi-dimensional environments, a spherical environment within which aural information is received by the central nervous system - that also embodies a transformation of the hermetic poetic insight that 'the universe (or nature) [or, in earlier versions, God] is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.' Today, virtual reality, as Borges's treatment of Pascal's sphere seems to imply, is coming to be our contemporary pre-millennial epitome of this symbol, a place where each participant (rather than the deity), as microcosm, is potentially the enigmatic centre. People englobed within virtual worlds find themselves interacting within complex, transverse, intertextual multimedia forms that are interlinked globally through complex, rhizomic (root-like) networks. The language of the Wake is a poetic anticipation of hypertextuality and hypermedia, since the mnemonics of paronomasia, portmanteau, and other verbal play establishes transverse nets of association above and beyond the ongoing flow of the printed and spoken text. All of this must necessarily relate back to the way Joyce treats the subject of and produces the artefact that is the book. While, beginning with Mallarme, the themes of the book and the death of literature resound through the varieties of modernisms and postmodernisms, Joyce's transformation of the book filtered through the 'McLuhanatic' reaction to 'McLuhanism' becomes, in the usual interpretation of McLuhan, the annunciation of the death of the book, not its transformation, as with Joyce. Joyce is important, for he situates speech and writing as modes of communication within a far richer and more complex bodily and gestural theory of communication than that represented by the reductive dichotomy of the oral and the literate. As the predominance of print declines, the Wake explores the history of communication by comically assimilating the method of Vico s The New Science, which, as one of the first systematic and empirical studies of the place of poetic action in the history of how people develop systems of signs and symbols, attributes people's ability for constructing their society to the poetic function, fundamentally to a process of cultural production.

Conclusion

191

Joyce avoids that facile over-simplification of the complexities of print arising from the orality/literacy dichotomy, which attributes a privileged role to language as verbal — a privilege based on theological and metaphysical claims. The same dichotomy creates problems in discussing technological and other non-verbal forms of mediated communication, including virtual reality and TV. At one point in the Wake, we find that 'television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!' (52.18-19), for TV also comprehends the visual and the kinaesthetic. Yet most McLuhanites who have opted for the orality/ literacy split still call TV an oral medium in opposition to print. The same problem occurs when mime, with its dependence on gesture and rhythm, is analysed as an oral medium. As the Wake jocularly observes, ... seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the cheerio, he aptly sketched for our soontobe second parents ... the touching scene. The science of that stilling! Here one might a fin fell. Boomster rombombonant! It scenes like a landescape from Wildu Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb as Mum's mutyness, this mimage ... is odable to os across the wineless Ere no cedor nor mere eerie nor liss potent of suggestion than in the tales of the tingmount. (52.34-53.6)

The mime plays with silence, sight, touch, and movement, seeming like a landscape or a movie. Facile over-simplification also overlooks the fact that long before the beginnings of the trend towards cyberspace, print had not been strictly oriented towards linearity and writing, for the print medium was supplemented by its encyclopaedic, multimedia nature, absorbing other media such as illustrations, charts, graphs, maps, diagrams, and tables, not all aspects of which are precisely linear. While writing may have had a predominantly linear tendency, its history is far more complex, as Elizabeth Eisenstein has established.17 The orality/literacy distinction does not provide an adequately rich concept for dealing with print, any more than it does for the most complex and comprehensive images of virtual reality and participatory hyperspace (e.g., sophisticated extensions of the datagloves or the Aspen map), which, to adapt a Joycean phrase, directly transmit 'feelful thinkamalinks.' Since virtual reality should enable a person to feel the bodily set of another person or place, while simultaneously receiving multiple intersensory messages, understanding the role of the body in communication is crucial for understanding virtual reality. When McLuhan and Carpenter first spoke about their concept of orality (linked to aurality, mouth to ear, as line of print to eye scan), it entailed recognizing the priority and primacy of tactility and intersensory activity in communication, for 'in the beginning there was the gest.' As Kenneth Burke realized in the 1930s, Joyce's grounding communication and

192

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

language in gesture is distinctly different from an approach which privileges oral language, for it involves a complete embodying of communication. While the oral only embodies the speech organs, the entire central nervous system is necessarily involved in all communication, including speech. As Bishop has shown, the sleeper in the Wake primarily receives sensations with his ear, but these are transformed within the body into the world of signs which permeate the dream and which constitute the Wake. Joyce views language as 'gest,' as an imaginary means of embodying intellectual-emotional complexes - his 'feelful thinkamalinks.' From this perspective, the semic units of the Wake (integrated complexes constructed from the interaction of speech and print, involving rhythm, orthography as sign and gesture, and visual image) assume the role of dialogue with other modes of mediated communication, exploiting their limitations and differences. Joyce crafts a new lingua for a world where the poetic book will deal with those aspects of the imaginary that cannot be encompassed within technologically mediated communication. Simultaneously, Joyce intuits that the trend towards cyberculture is characteristic of the electro-mechanically or technologically mediated modes of communication. This process posits a continuous dialogue in which Ulysses and the Wake were designed to play key roles. As Joyce, who quipped that in Finnegans Wake 'some of the means I use are trivial - and some are quadrivial,'19 was aware, ancient rhetorical theory (which he parodied both in the Aeolus' episode of Ulysses and in the 'Triv and Quad' chapter [II.2] of the Wake] also included those interactive contexts where the body was an intrinsic part of communication. Delivery involved controlling the body and the context within which it was presented, as well as the voice. The actual rhetorical action (particularly in judicial oratory) also frequently involved demonstration and witnesses. This analysis, closer to the pre-literate, recognized the way actual communication integrated oral, visual, rhythmical, gestural, and kinaesthetic components. Recent research into the classical and medieval 'arts of memory,' inspired by Frances Yates,20 has demonstrated that memory involves the body, a sense of the dramatic and theatrical, visual icons, and movement, as well as the associative power of the oral itself. Joyce playfully invokes this memory system familiar to him from his Jesuit education. A classical world, which recognized such features of the communicative process, could readily speak about the poem as a 'speaking picture' and the painting as 'silent poetry.' Here, there is an inclusiveness of the means available rather than a dependency on a single channel of communication. Joyce was so intrigued by the potential of the new techno-culture of time and space for reconstructing and revolutionizing the book that, as we have seen, he claimed himself to be 'the greatest engineer,' as well as a Renaissance man, who was also a 'musicmaker, a philosophist and heaps of other things.'21 The mosaic of the Wake contributes to understanding the nature of cyberspace by grasping the radical

Conclusion

193

constitution of the electronic cosmos that Joyce called 'the chaosmos of Alle' (118.21). In this 'chaosmos,' engineered by a sense of interactive mnemo-technics, he intuits the relation between a nearly infinite quantity of cultural information and the mechanical yet rhizomic organization of a network, 'the matrix' (the internet), which underlies the construction of imaginary and virtual worlds. The crucial reason for raising the historic image of Joyce in a discussion of cyberspace is that he carries out one of the most comprehensive contemporary discussions of virtual recollection - a concept first articulated by Henri Bergson as virtual memory.22 In counterpoint to the emerging technological capability to create the 'artificial reality' of cyberspace, Joyce turned to dream and hallucination for the creation of virtual worlds within natural language. That tactile, gestural-based dream world has built-in mnemonic systems. Joyce's virtual worlds began with the recognition of 'everybody' as a poet, for each person is co-producer. All culture becomes the panorama of his dream; the purpose of poetic writing in a post-electric world is the painting of that interior (which is not the psychoanalytic, but the social, unconscious) and the providing of new language appropriate to perceiving the complexities of the new world of technologically reproducible media: Joyce's text is embodied in gesture, enclosed in words, enmeshed in time, and engaged in foretelling 'Today's truth. Tomorrow's trend.' The poet reproducing his producers is the divining prophet. If speaking of Joyce and cyberspace seems to imply a kind of futurology, the whole of McLuhan's project was frequently treated as prophesying the emergence of a new tribalized global society - the global village - itself anticipated by Joyce's 'international' language of multilingual puns. In fact, in War and Peace in the Global Village, McLuhan uses Wakese (mostly from Joyce, but freely associated) as marginalia. McLuhan flourished in his role as an international guru by casting himself in the role of 'the prime prophet' announcing the coming of a new era of communication23 (now talked about as virtual reality or cyberspace, though naturally he never actually used those words). The prime source of his 'prophecies,' which he never concealed, is to be found in Joyce and Vico.25 The entire Joycean dream is prophetic or divinatory in part, for the anticipated awakening (Vice's fourth age ofricorso following birth, marriage, and death) is 'providential divining': Ere we are! Signifying, if tungs may tolkan, that, primeval conditions having gradually receded but nevertheless the emplacement of solid and fluid having to a great extent persisted through intermittences of sullemn fulminance, sollemn nuptialism, sallemn sepulture and providential divining, making possible and even inevitable, after his a time has a tense haves and havenots hesitency, at the place and period under consideration a socially organic entity of a millenary military maritory monetary morphological circumformation in a more or less settled state of equonomic ecolube equalobe equilab equilibbrium. (599.8-18)

194

James Joyce's Techno-Poetics

Earlier, it has been said of the dreamer that 'he caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present' (496.34-497.1). Joyce, from whom McLuhan derived the idea, is playing with the medieval concept of natural prophecy, making it a fundamental feature of the epistemology of his dream world, in which the 'give and take' of the 'mind factory,' an 'antithesis of ambidual anticipation,' generates auspices, auguries, and divination - for 'DIVINITY NOT DEITY [IS] THE UNCERTAINTY JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE' (282.R7-13). Natural prophecy, the medieval way of thinking about futurology, with which Joyce and McLuhan were both familiar from scholasticism and Thomism, occurs through a reading of history and its relation to that virtual, momentary social text, the present, which is dynamic and always undergoing change. Joyce appears to blend this medieval concept with classical sociological ideas - of prophecy as an 'intermediation' — quite consistent with his concepts of communication as involving aspects of participation and communion. It is only through some such reading that the future existent in history can be known and come to be. McLuhan's reading, adapted from Joyce, of the collision of history and the present moment led him to foresee a world emerging where communication would be tactile, postverbal, fully participatory, and pan-sensory. Why ought communication history and theory take account of Joyce's poetic project? First, because he designed a new language (later disseminated by McLuhan, Eco, and Derrida) to carry out an in-depth interpretation of a complex socio-historical phenomenon, namely new modes of semiotic production. Two brief examples: Hollywood 'wordloosing celluloid ... soundscript over seven seas' (FW219.16-17), or the products of the Hollywood dream factory itself as 'a roll[ing] away the reel world' (PW64.25), reveal media's potential international domination as well as the problems film form raises for the mutual claims of the imaginary and the real. For example, the term 'abortisement' CFW181.33; advertisement) suggests the manipulation of fetishized femininity with its submerged relation of advertisement to butchering - the segmentation of the body as object into an assemblage of parts. Second, Joyce's work is a critique of communication's historical role in the production of culture, and it constitutes one of the earliest recognitions of the importance of Vico to a contemporary history of communication and culture. Third, his work is itself the first 'in-depth' contemporary exploration of the complexities of reading, writing, rewriting, speaking, aurality, and orality. Fourth, developing Vice's earlier insights and anticipating Kenneth Burke, he sees the importance of the 'poetic' as a concept in communication, for the poetic is the means of generating new communicative potentials between medium and message. This provides the poetic, the arts, and other modes of cultural production with a crucial role in a

Conclusion

195

semiotic ecology of communication, an ecology of sense and making sense. Fifth, in the innovative practice of this project, Joyce develops one of the most complex discussions of the contemporary transformation of our media of communication. And finally, his own work is itself an exemplum of the socio-ecological role of the poetic in human communication. Cyberculture and cyberspace, as an assemblage of a multiplicity of existing and new media, dramatizes the relativity of our classifications of media and their effects. The newly evolving global metropolis arising in the age of cyberspace is a site where people are intellectual nomads: differentiation, difference, and decentring characterize its structure. Joyce and the arts of high modernism and postmodernism provide a solid appreciation of how people constantly reconstruct or remake reality through the traversing of the multi-sensory fragments of a Virtual world' and of the tremendous powers with which electricity and the analysis of mechanization endow the paramedia that eventually emerge.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Introduction 1 Referring to a conversation when they first met, Carola Giedion-Welcker explains: 'In the manuscript of Exiles (1919) the central characters of the play, Richard and Robert, were distinguished as "auto-mystic" and "auto-mobile." "Language-landage" [sic], as it was later called in Finnegans Wake, seemed to resonate here already. From a key word and the conceptions it aroused, Joyce wanted to crystalize a cultural state, or better yet the cultural crisis of a century. For god and technology had moved critically close to each other' (Carola Giedion-Welcker, 'Meetings with Joyce,' in Portraits of the Artist in Exile, 257-8). It should be noted, though, that she was aware of the close connection between Joyce's work and science and technology when she wrote about fragments from Work in Progress in 1929 (Carola GiedionWelcker, 'On Joyce's Experiment' [1929], in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 2:495-9). 2 William Wordsworth, 'Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,' in The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, 758 3 FW510.6-9, which is analysed later in chapter 9 4 David Hayman, The 'Wake' in Transit, 12 5 Michael Phillipson, In Modernity's Wake, 21 6 Donald F. Theall, Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication 7 Carola Giedion-Welcker, 'On Ulysses,' in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 2:437—43 8 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 90; for further amplification, see Felix Guattari, 'Machinic Heterogenesis,' in Chaos and Order, 13-27. 9 Theall, Beyond the Word, ix 10 Phillipson, In Modernity's Wake, 21

198 Notes to pages 3-6 1: James Joyce and the 'Modern': Machines, Media, and the Mimetic 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12

13 14 15

Michael Phillipson, In Modernity's Wake: The Ameurunculus Letters, 15-17 See Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 2-3 It should be noted that this involved mathematical ideas about chaos - not what is now called chaos theory. 'Carola Giedion-Welcker,' in Potts, ed., Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans, 253—5 Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, 286 Wyndham Lewis, Blast, 133 See chapter 2 for a description of this concept in its historical development, as well as contemporary discussions of it by Northrop Frye, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Julia Kristeva. Nino Frank, 'The Shadow That Had Lost Its Man,' in Potts, ed., Portraits of the Artist in Exile, 84-5; Louis Gillet, 'The Living Joyce,' in ibid., 180; and Jacques Mercanton, 'The Hours of James Joyce,' in ibid., 223 For example, George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 19-20 For a specific description of the poem as machine and a comparison of poet and engineer, see Valery's The Art of Poetry, 78-9; Aesthetics, 134-5; and Anthology, 33-93. For Vico on Leonardo da Vinci and Daedalus, see Giambattista Vico, The New Science of..., 212-13 (§634, §635). JJ to Stanislaus Joyce (13 Nov. 1906), Letters, 2:194. Stephen links Dante, Leonardo, and Thomas Aquinas in the 'Nighttown' section of Ulysses (16.887). See also Stephen Hero: He seemed almost to hear the simple cries of fear and joy and wonder which are antecedent to all song, the savage rhythms of men pulling at the oar, to see the rude scrawls and the portable gods of men whose legacy Leonardo and Michelangelo inherit. And over all this chaos of history and legend, of fact and supposition, he strove to draw out a line of order, to reduce the abysses of the past to order by a diagram. (5//33) Walter Pater, The Renaissance, 88 JJ to Harriet Shaw Weaver (postcard, 16 April 1927), Letters, 1:251 This selection of dates is based on 1905 as the year of Einstein's special theory and die year when Freud completed the publication of his three major early works, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and Witandlts Relation to the Unconscious (1905); and 1941 was the year of Joyce's death. Compare Stephen Kern, who selects the years 1880-1918 for his The Culture of Time and Space; and Joyce's friend and colleague, Sigfried Giedion, who in Mechanization Takes Command selects the period between die First and Second World Wars as 'the time of full mechanization.'

Notes to pages 6-14

199

16 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, 104 17 Ibid., 103-4 18 The term 'everybody' should also suggest the relation of the dreamer to what French critics discuss (e.g., Henri Lefebvre and Jean Baudrillard) as 'quotidiennete,' everyday life. Both Bloom and the dreamer of the Wake are important in the way they represent 'everybody.' 19 See chapter 3 for more details on Stephen and Bloom. 20 See Marshall McLuhan, 'Joyce> Mallarm^ and the Press'; also David Hayman, Joyce et Mallarme\ and Julia Kristeva, La Revolution du langage poetique. 21 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 545 22 James Joyce, Critical Writings, 145. Jacques Aubert's discussion clearly indicates that Joyce, adapting theories of Bosanquet and Butcher, was using this phrase to establish a theory of rhythm with which to confront the problem of the Imaginary and the Symbolic 0- Aubert, The Aesthetics of James Joyce, 89). It should be noted, coming as it does from the Physics, that it clearly involves the idea of imitation as a process not a representation. The medievals interpreted this as referring to art imitating nature sua operatione. Rhythm would certainly seem to imitate more in the sense of process than of representation, even though some rhythms may have representational possibilities. 23 I have borrowed the term 'machinic' from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who use this term frequently, to avoid the connection of'machine' or 'machinery' with a mechanistic perspective. See, in particular, Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, 104-5. 24 Malcolm Lowry to Jonathan Cape [2 Jan. 1946], Selected Letters, 66.1 first became aware of this passage upon reading Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 128-9. 2 5 Ellmann, James Joyce, 614 26 JJ to Harriet Shaw Weaver (28 May 1929), Letters, 1:280 27 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of 'Ulysses,' 129 28 JJ to Harriet Shaw Weaver (16 Nov. 1924), Letters, 1:222 29 Ellmann, James Joyce, 543. Cf.: 'I am boring through a mountain from two sides. The question is how to meet in the middle' (Frank Budgen, 'James Joyce,' in Givens, ed., James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, 24). 30 Claude LeVi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 19 31 Benjamin, 'Surrealism,' in One-Way Street, 227 32 JJ to Frank Budgen (20 Aug. 1939), Letters, 1:406-7 33 Right from the opening pages of the Wake, religious motifs are secularized by being resituated in lower, contemporary earthly things of commerce and entertainment. For example, 'a waalworth of a skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly' (4.35-6) (the Woolworth Building, the Eiffel Tower) has 'a burning bush abob off its baubletop' (Moses and the Tower of Babel); or as 'by the might of moses, the very water was eviparated and all the guenneses had met their exodus' (4.23-4). This language of'blasphe-

200

Notes to pages 17-21

matory spits' (183.24) is a language of excess and transgression, and its poet, 'jameymock farceson,' is like the poet archetype in the dream.Shem, who is 'always blaspheming, so holy writ' (177.23), for he is 'a boosted blasted bleating blatant bloaten blasphorus blesphorous idiot' (167.13-17). While Jameymock Farceson's strategies encompass the transgressions of Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, they extend further, for Joyce, like his contemporary Georges Bataille (also an ex-Catholic, medievalist, encyclopaedist, and avant-garde writer), conceives the strategy of grotesque debasement as a transmutation of the object - a resituating of the sacred in the secular, so that the poet becomes 'Pain the Shamman' (192.23). 2: Art as Vivisection: The Encyclopaedic Mechanics of Menippean Satire 1 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, 49 2 Wyndham Lewis, The Complete Wild Body, 158. The Black Sparrow Press edition contains a large body of additional material that shows how Lewis developed the stories and theories that were published in the first edition. 3 Ibid., 151 4 Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art, 93 5 Ibid., 232 6 See Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, 7 Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 84 8 See, for example, Darko Suvin's writings on Brecht. 9 Eugene Jolas, 'The Revolution of Language and James Joyce,' in Beckett et al., Our Exagmination, 79 10 The comparison ought not to be that startling if one thinks about the use of medieval models in early twentieth-century literature; particularly of Pound's imitations of Goliardic and Provencal poets and of Cavalcanti and Dante. 11 Archpoet, Confessio, in Helen Waddell, Medieval Latin Lyrics, 170-83 12 Waddell, Medieval Latin Lyrics, 330 13 See his lectures on Ireland in Critical Writings, 157-200. 14 For discussions of'modern,' see Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 14-46. For details of the medieval significance ofmodernitas and the 'ancients' and the 'moderns,' see Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 251-5. The literature involving Swift, Pope, and other members of the Scriblerus group with the quarrel of the ancients and moderns is extensive. Dante as a modern is marked by his use of the vernacular and his claim 'the water I take has never been coursed before' (Paradiso 2.7). See Mary Reynolds, Joyce and Dante, 77. Philippe Sellers s perception of Dante as modern is suggested in G. Lernout, The French Joyce, 120. 15 For a discussion of Joyce's early use of'classicism' and 'classical temper,' see Jacques Aubert, The Aesthetics of James Joyce, 12, 13, 31, 63-4, 69. Aubert points out the significan

Notes to pages 22-5

16 17

18

19 20

21 22 23 24

201

to Joyce of Bernard Bosanquet's History of Aesthetics and Bosanquet's interpretations of Hegel's philosophy of fine art. John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, 113-16 I originally advanced these ideas in the early 1950s in unpublished seminar papers at the University of Toronto on James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, and Alexander Pope's The Dundad. The ideas are developed with respect to Pope and his contemporaries in Donald Theall, 'Pope's Satiric Program: The War with the Dunces,' in Report of ACUTE (1960) 11—16. See also Aubrey Williams, Pope's 'Dunciad': A Study of Its Meaning. For a somewhat different interpretation of Menippean satire, see Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism, 14, 309—12. Recognition of the importance of the genre became more widespread later under the influence of Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World. For a discussion of its application to modern writing, see Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, which originally appeared in Semiotica in 1969. Aspects of Bakhtin's writings with respect to Joyce have been examined by Brandon Kershner in Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder. Alexander Pope used the lesser and greater Eleusinian mysteries in The Dunciad to strengthen his critique of contemporary Enthusiastic religions, which were affiliated with a new populism. This is first identified by William Warburton in his annotations to Pope. For a contemporary discussion, see Williams, Pope's 'Dunciad.' Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, 304 Frances Yates argues this in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, where she sees the occult tradition as a precursor of the rise of science, particularly Francis Bacon's project for the 'advancement of learning.' She points this out succinctly in The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, 174—5. Her work is particularly important to Joyce studies since one of her major works was Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and because of her classic study on the history of memory and its relation to theatrical design in the Elizabethan period in The Art of Memory. This could partly explain the approach of Robert Anton Wilson to Joyce in Coincidance, which intermingles the hermetic, the occult, and modern physics. Giambattista Vico, New Science, 115 (§403) See Peter Burger, Theory oftheAvant-Garde, 68-72. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 185 .FW185.14—25. The translation given in Roland McHugh, Annotations to 'Finnegans Wake', is as follows: 'First the artist, the eminent writer, without any shame or apology, pulled up his raincoat & undid his trousers & then drew himself close to the life-giving & allpowerful earth, with his buttocks bare as they were born. Weeping & groaning he relieved himself into his own hands. Then, unburdened of the black beast, 8c sounding a trumpet, he put his own dung which he called his "down-castings" into an urn once used as an honoured mark of mourning. With an invocation to the twin brethren Medard & Godard he then passed water into it happily & mellifluously, while chanting

202

25

26

27 28 29 30 31 32

33

Notes to pages 25-32

in a loud voice the psalm which begins "My tongue is the pen of a scribe writing swiftly." Finally, from the foul dung mixed, as I have said, with the "sweetness of orion" & baked & then exposed to the cold, he made himself an indelible ink.' I have used Benjamin's Hebrew biblical terminology with an echo of Hobbes. Joyce's Leviathan appears as a crocodile, a dragon, and a whale in a manner consistent with the various biblical meanings of Leviathan. Obviously the terms refer to the financial world and to the power of the state. Conceiving of oneself as a poetic engineer can easily be associated with sinking 'deep' to 'touch ... the Cartesian spring,' as references to mathematicians Etienne Bezouts and Blaise Pascal ('my pascol's kondyl') underline. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, 227, 237 Cf. FWl 71.1 -28. Here Shem as allegorical figure consumes a brew of sensory particularities. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 177, 231 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 230 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 167; and Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 70-1 Darko Suvin provides a preferable translation for Brecht's concept rather than the usual 'alienation effect.' See Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre; and Darko Suvin, To Brecht and Beyond: Soundings in Modern Dramaturgy. 'The historic-allegorical mediod illustrates the disintegration of laughter that took place in the 17th Century' (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 115).

3: Electro-Mechanization, Communication, and the Poet as Engineer 1 'The ideal way of constructing an a posteriori language would be to make the root words monosyllabic ... & to make the grammar a priori in spirit' (Jesperson quoting Dr Sweet; cited in Roland McHugh, Annotations to 'Finnegans Wake,' 83). 2 Marshall McLuhan, 'Joyce, Mallarm^ and the Press,' in The Literary Criticism ofMarshallMcLuhan 1943/1962, 5-21 3 For detailed arguments, see: Phillip F. Herring, ed., Joyce's 'Ulysses'Notesheets in the British Museum; Phillip F. Herring, ed., Joyce's Notes and Early Drafts for 'Ulysses': Selections from the Buffalo Collection; Michael Groden, 'Ulysses'in Progress; A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake.' 4 McLuhan, 'Joyce, Mallarme and the Press,' 16-19. This article, which first pointed out the connections, originally appeared in the Southern Review in 1953. Hugh Kenner discusses Joyce in a chapter called 'Joyce Scrivening' in The Mechanic Muse, 61-83. His interpretation of'mechanic' and his treatment of Joyce are quite closely tied to printing and the linotype machine. While he mentions more general impacts of the machine on

Notes to pages 32—7

203

modernism, he does not systematically extend that notion to the electro-mechanical and electronic or to the techno-organizational structure of society. The argument here grounds the concepts of machine and machinic in a theoretical argument suggested primarily by the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as those of Baudrillard, Derrida, and McLuhan. 5 Groden, 'Ulysses' in Progress, 63ff 6 Note in the Wake the following passage discussed in detail later: 'His producers are they not his consumers? Your exagmination around his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim!' (497.1—2). 7 'J°yce> Ulysse, c'est le quotidien, presente, transfigure", non par 1'irruption d'une lumiere et d'un chant surhumain, mais par la parole de 1'homme, ou peut-etre simplement par la litterature' (Henri Lefebvre, La Vie quotidienne dans la mode moderne, 19). 8 JJ to Harriet Shaw Weaver (16 Nov. 1924), Letters, 1:222 9 For the role of socialism and anarchism in Joyce's political thought, see Dominic Manganie\\o, Joyce's Politics. I believe this position can be described as a restrained socialistanarchism. 10 Umberto Eco found this word such a key to Joyce's method of construction that it provided the title for the English translation of his Poetiche di Joyce. See Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics ofChaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. 11 Francis Bacon, The Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral of Francis Bacon, 299-302 12 Stephane Mallarme, Oeuvres completes, 1244 13 It is useful to remember the association of kinetic poetry and pornography that Stephen notes in PortraitV, 205. 14 Michael Seidel, Epic Geography: James Joyce's 'Ulysses' 15 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of 'Ulysses,' 121 16 Ibid., 122-3 17 For a somewhat different analysis of some of these details, see the chapter on Joyce cited above in Kenner, The Mechanic Muse. 18 For Joyce's education in rhetoric and the other arts of the trivium, see Kevin Sullivan, Joyce among the Jesuits, 83-4. Joyce's use of rhetoric in the 'Aeolus' chapter was first illustrated by Stuart Gilbert (presumably aided by notes from Joyce) m James Joyce's 'Ulysses,' 191-5. Roland Barthes, 'The Old Rhetoric,' in The Semiotic Challenge, provides a useful historical outline of rhetorical studies, indicating that at various times it was both a technique (i.e., an art as a series of rules and recipes) and a science. Pope and Swift frequently satirized and played upon the 'mechanics' of rhetoric. For a full treatment of Joyce's use of rhetorical figures in the 'Aeolus' episode, see Don Gifford,' Ulysses'Annotated, 63543. 19 Gifford, 'Ulysses'Annotated, 160. Stephen Kern discusses the significance of the debate over standard time in The Culture of Time and Space, 11-15. 20 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 432

204

Notes to pages 38-46

21 Budgen, Making of Ulysses,' 129 22 Again 'natural machines' is used to suggest Deleuze's concept of machine, which includes parts of natural creatures, since any machine in the first instance is related to the continual material flow (hyle) which it cuts into. For this relationship between the machine and hylomorphism, see Gilles Deleuze and Fe"lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 407-10. 23 Marjorie Crump, The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid. While the term 'epyllion' seems to be a nineteenth-century creation to refer to the short Alexandrian epic, the form was specifically recognized in English earlier; for example, Pope refers to the 'little epic' in The Dunciad. See also the articles on Alexandrian poetry and the epyllion in the Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Prose. The complexities of the transmission of the epic tradition in European literature is discussed in J.K. Newman, The Classical Epic Tradition. 24 It has been pointed out that this refers to A Portrait of the Artist III, 129: 'The sootcoated packet of pictures he had hidden in the flue of the fireplace and in the presence of whose shameless or bashful wantonness he lay for hours sinning in thought and deed" (McHugh, Annotations, 183). 25 For the reference to Dickens's Oliver Twist, which also suggests Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, see McHugh, 173. 26 Giambattista Vico, New Science, §§634, 699 27 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader, 67-89; see also Eco, The Aesthetics ofChaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, 65-70. 28 Stephen's remark echoes what Joyce himself says about Marcel Jousse. See Lorraine Weir, Writing Joyce, 37—8, 50, 55-6, 73, 85. For a fuller discussion, see Lorraine Weir, 'The Choreography of Gesture: Marcel Jousse and Finnegans Wake.' 29 Memory theatres are discussed in considerable detail in Frances Yates, The Art of Memory. 30 For more information with respect to the 'lapwing' reference, see GifTord, 'Ulysses' Annotated, 245. 31 This phrasing confirms the parallel made in chapter 1 between vivisection and Benjamin's account of the artist as a surgeon. 32 Walter Pater, The Renaissance; see Gifford's note (p.218) to £79.376-8. 33 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, 51-72 34 Budgen, Making, 21 35 These charts are inserted in Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey, in an appendix between pages 186 and 187. They present differing schemas of the plan of Ulysses given to Linati and to Gorman and Gilbert. 36 JJ to Frank Budgen, in Making, 262 37 JJ to Frank Budgen [end Feb. 1921], Letters, 1:160 38 For a clarification of this passage, consult the various notes on lines 1092 to 1109 in Gifford, 'Ulysses'Annotated, 433-4. Joyce is dealing with an apparent movement and

Notes to pages 47-52

39 40 41 42 43

44 45

205

change among the stars and constellations in the late evening sky. The first of these is the constellation Virgo. As Virgo, associated with the virgin, sets towards dawn, the focus moves to a cluster of stars, the Pleiades, in the constellation Taurus which would have risen at 3:00 a.m. (just before dawn on 17 June). Joyce associates the Pleiades with Martha and Milly, thus transforming the virgin into Milly. Milly acts as a harbinger for the daystar for 17 June, which was the planet Venus. Venus then appears to be transformed into Alpha Tauri, the brightest of the stars (presumably Molly), which is a giant red star in the triangle of stars that form the forehead of the constellation Taurus the Bull. It is interesting to note that this series of transformations from Virgo the Virgin to the Pleiades to Venus to Alpha Tauri all seem to represent aspects of ALP. Budgen, Making, 258 JJ to Claud W. Sykes [n.d., spring 1921], Letters, 1:164 JJ to Frank Budgen, Letters, 1:159-60. Cf. Budgen, Making of Ulysses,' 257, which first brought this passage to the attention of scholars. Herring, ed., Joyce's Notes and Early Drafts for 'Ulysses': Selections from the Buffalo Collection, 49 See Maurice Horn, ed., The Encyclopedia of Comics, 76—7, for a discussion of the first British comic-strip hero (or anti-hero), who appeared in 1867. For an 1884 example of the strip, see George Perry and Alan Aldridge, The Penguin Book of Comics, 55-6. I have borrowed the phraseology used by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in AntiOedipus, 32. 'What proofs did Bloom adduce to prove that his tendency was towards applied, rather than towards pure, science? 'Certain possible inventions of which he had cogitated when reclining in a state of supine repletion to aid digestion, stimulated by his appreciation of the importance of inventions now common but once revolutionary, for example, the aeronautic parachute, the reflecting telescope, the spiral corkscrew, the safety pin, the mineral water siphon, the canal lock with winch and sluice, the suction pump' (t/17.561-8).

4: Singing the Electro-Mechano-Chemical Body 1 Donald F. Theall, 'Sound, Sense and the Enveloping Facts: Inspecting the Wit's Waste of an Unheavenly Body,' 99 2 For example, Sylvia and Bruno and The Hunting of the Shark, both of which, as well as the Alice books, are discussed from this perspective in Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense. 3 Michel Butor, Introduction aux fragments de 'Finnegans Wake,' 12 (my translation) 4 For details see D. Hayman, The 'Wake' in Transit, passim; D. Hayman, A First Draft Version of'Finnegans Wake,' 205-19; and Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, Understanding 'Finnegans Wake,' 209-16. 5 Roland McHugh, Annotations, 388

206

Notes to pages 52-6

6 'A Song of Myself by Whitman has usually been associated with the closing pages of the 'Inquisition of Yawn' — 'Old Whitehowth he is speaking again' (535-26) — introducing that part of the Wake known by its chapbook publication as Haveth Childers Everywhere ('Pity poor Haveth Childers Everywhere with Mudder!' [535.34]). Cf. Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake,' 305; and James Atherton, The Books at the Wake, 288. With respect to electricity and the body, compare Stephen's remarks about Luigi Galvani (Portrait, 212). A reference to Wilde and also to 'white house' is present in 'Old Whitehowth.' 7 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 543. Cf.: 'I am boring through a mountain from two sides. The question is how to meet in the middle' (quoted in Givens, ed., James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, 24). 8 Ellmann, James Joyce, 614, 801nl5 9 John Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark: 'Finnegans Wake,'292-3 (fig. 9.5). Each of these items is related to the root V BHA in Skeat's Etymological Dictionary, which Joyce is known to have used. 10 'Surd' means both an irrational number (e.g., V2) in mathematics or voicelessness in linguistics and is derived from the medieval Latin surdus (speechless), a translation of Arab (jahdrasdmm) deaf (root), surd, translation of Greek, alogos < surd, deafness (Roland McHugh, Annotations to 'Finnegans Wake,' 284). 11 Following the First World War it became common to speak of land, air, and sea forces, a fact with which Joyce would have been only too painfully familiar in Europe during the 1930s. In the 1930s, recruiting for the U.S. military used the phrases 'on land, on sea, and in the air.' 12 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, 69—70 13 'Jousstly' refers to Marcel Jousse's important work on communication and the semiotics of gesture, with which Joyce was familiar. See, especially, Lorraine Weir, 'The Choreography of Gesture: Marcel Jousse and Finnegans Wake.' 14 This motif will be further developed below. It relates to Joyce's interest in Lewis Carroll. Gilles Deleuze comments extensively on manducation in The Logic of Sense. 15 See Walter Ong's remarks about Marcel Jousse in The Presence of the Word, 146-7; and Lorraine Weir's more extensive development of the theme in Writing Joyce: A Semiotics of the Joyce System, and in her 1977 article, 'The Choreography of Gesture,' already mentioned. 16 See I.J. Gelb, A Study of Writing. 17 In, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Umberto Eco notes that Saussure was the first - hesitantly andfleetingly- to speak of'le code de la langue,' but that the full application of this insight did not come to flower until Shannon and Weaver's articulation of information theory, clearly connected to the electric transmission of messages. Then Jakobson introduced it as a major concept in phonetics, linguistics, and semiotics. The first citation of the word code in the OED is 1808, when it is applied to military

Notes to pages 56-9

18

19 20

21 22 23

24

25 26

27

207

signal systems. But Samuel Morse's development in 1837 of the signalling code which came to be associated with his name was obviously necessitated by the movement of information over an electric line. Poe's rather important interest in codes matured subsequent to Morse after 1840. This began a modernist interest in codes in relation to literary and artistic composition. See also Donald F. Theall, Beyond the Word, chapters 2 and 11. The issue would appear to be more complex than suggested by those who sharply distinguish between code and interpretation, such as Johnathan Culler (Structuralist Poetics, The Pursuit of Signs). 'One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal' (T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 182); 'Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires' (Eliot, 'East Coker,' Four Quartets, 1.5). Joyce's use of'outlex' relates to Jim the Penman, for Joyce, analysing Shem in the Wake, is aware of how the traditions of the artist as liar, as counterfeiter, as con man, and as thief could all coalesce about the role of the artist as an outlaw. This is not to preclude relating this phrase to the action of the Crucifixion - that action itself being a dramatic communication. While the popularization of the phrase 'dream factory' did not occur until after 1950, when Hortense Powdermaker published her study of Hollywood, The Dream Factory, the motif of the cinema as a mechanism for producing dreams is a central concern of Expressionist cinema in the 1920s in such works as The Clergyman and the Seashell or Hans Richter's Ghosts before Breakfast. The first use of phraseology indicating the cinema could be a 'dream factory' was in Germany in 1931, clearly a reflection of Expressionist film practice in the 1920s. See S. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 327n25, citing Ilja Ehrenburg, Die Traumfabrik. Ellmann, James Joyce, 654. See also Gosta Werner, 'James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein,' 498. Conic sections and their relation to electromagnetism will be discussed in later chapters. Deleuze (The Logic of Sense, 23-6, in the chapter entitled 'Fourth Series: Of Dualities') discusses the role of 'to eat' and 'to speak' in the Alice books and Sylvia and Bruno. The sentence 'One of the most murmurable loose carollaries ever Ellis threw his cookingclass' was added in a revision sometime between 1934 and 1937, well after Joyce learned of Carroll's work in 1927 (JJA 53:215.47478-75). G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 105 While I have not found the term 'bathos' in Joyce, he speaks of Shem's 'lowness' quite frequently as a style and of 'sinking' - see 'sinking ofter the soapstone of silvry speech' (140.26) or 'the Monster Book of Paltryattic Puetrie, Opura epia bel/alin junk et sampam or in secular sinkalarum' (178.16). Pope entitled his Peri Bathous, 'The Art of Sinking in Poetry.' With regard to the sensory system and memory, 'that weed' (tobacco) is described in

208

Notes to pages 60-7

Ulysses as "... a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will, understanding, all' (U\ 5.13 58-9). 28 '... adding the tout that pumped the stout that linked the lank that cold the sandy that nextdoored the rotter that rooked the rhymer that lapped at the hoose that Joax pilled' (F W369.13-15). 29 As discussed above in chapter 2, muscles, nerves, and the skeleton dominate the closing chapters of Ulysses in both the Linati and Gorman versions of Joyce's master-plan. 5: Books, Machines, and Processes of Production and Consumption 1 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 149 2 John Bishop, Joyce s Book of the Dark, 26ff 3 As William Tindall pointed out in A Reader's Guide to 'Finnegans Wake,' 321, the reversal of the words 'there was' (L.,Juit) and 'let there be' (L.,fiat) allude to the biblical act of creation, so once again to light and colour as well. 4 See FW281.4 for the full text of the sentence Joyce uses as a motif here and elsewhere in the Wake, which begins: 'Aujourd'hui, comme aux jours de Pline et Columelle, la jacinthe se plait dans les Gaules, la pervenche en Illyrie, la marguerite sur les ruines de Numance ...' (Edgar Quinet, Introduction a la philosophic de I'histoire de I'humanite, cited and translated in Roland McHugh, Annotations, 281). See also James Atherton, The Books at the Wake, 34-5. 5 Bernard Benstock, Joyce-Again 's Wake, 201 6 Giambattista Vico, New Science, §§619, 899 7 Roland McHugh, Sigla, IU-JJA 33 VLB. 19.88 8 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, 184—5; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 349—50 9 Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, Understanding 'Finnegans Wake,' 308—9 10 'Mimetic' in Joyce's sense of the term, that is, art imitates nature sua operatione. See Jacques Aubert, The Aesthetics of James Joyce, 89-90. 11 The radioactive properties of uranium were first demonstrated in 1896 when the French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel produced, by the action of the fluorescent salt potassium uranyl sulfate, an image on a photographic plate covered with a light-absorbing substance. The investigations of radioactivity that followed Becquerel s experiment led to the discovery of radium and to new concepts of atomic organization. Subsequently, Rutherford developed a new theory of atomic structure based on the radioactivity of uranium. 12 This passage is a slight rephrasing of a passage in III.3 (349.6-19), part of the scene in HCE's inn. It is discussed in an article I co-authored with Joan B. Theall, 'Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce: Beyond Media,' 60-1. This article also explains why the theme of the machinic in Joyce is related to Marshall McLuhan's very extensive use (and misuse) of Joyce quotes in his works on communication, culture, and technology. Fur-

Notes to pages 68-74

209

ther discussion of the theme of the semic machine can be found in Donald F. Theall, 'Sendence of Sundance: Sense, Communication and Community in Finnegans Wake.' The 'abnihilisation of the etym' should be related to the 'sartor's risorted' (314.17) (Sartor Resartus) motif associated with tailoring in the Wake, for it also most likely echoes Carlyle's 'Phoenix theory' of society (in some ways consonant with Vice's recorso), as well as the traditional Christian notion of Creation ex nihilo. 13 Brendan O'Hehir, A Classical Lexicon for 'Finnegans Wake,' 215. See also 'Hardest Crux Ever,' in Magalaner, ed., A James Joyce Miscellany (Second Series), 195-208, esp. 205-6. 14 In the modern ecological sense, as used by Gregory Bateson and Gilles Deleuze in their works 15 'Root' is derived from Old English, 'rot,' which is derived from Old Norse. It should be of interest to Joyceans that the Indo-European root for 'rot' is 'werad'; cf: 'In the becoming was the weared' (FW487.21). This is also the root of'radical,' 'race,' and 'rhizo-.' 16 S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, I, 202 17 I have coined this term to avoid confusion with the usual theoretical meaning of'deconstruct.' A process of deconstructing or disassembling is involved in Joyce's description of the Vicociclometer,' which later leads to a new construct. 'Dismantle' more accurately describes Joyce's activity than does the Coleridgean 'dissolves, diffuses and dissipates' because Joyce as mechanic is an assembler and disassembler as well as a dissembler. 18 In New Science, Vico's axiom 217 observes: 'all arts of things necessary, useful, convenient, and even in large part for those of human pleasure, were invented in the poetic centuries before the philosophers came; for the arts are nothing but imitations of nature, poems in a certain way made of things.' Joyce revised and modernized this idea, but he also appreciated Vico's insight of the centrality of the poetic necessitating a need for a poetic anthropology. Vico, it will be remembered, speaks of poetic wisdom, poetic logic, poetic geography, poetic physics, etc. 19 McHugh (80.24) comments that Siva is the Hindu god of destruction. But Siva was also associated with light, awakening; see, for example, Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India, 461-2. Siva is the Inner Self and is associated with waking and dreaming. His dance could be creative or destructive. See R.C. Zaehner, Hinduism, 112ff. 20 Roland Barthes, 'Structural Activity,' in Critical Essays, 213—23 6: The Machinic Maze of Mimesis: The Labyrinthine Dance of Mind and Machine 1 The phrase 'history of the world' is used with deliberation, since Joyce indicated at one point that he, like H.G. Wells, was writing a history of the world, and he uses the Viconian vision of world history as a comic scaffolding for his dream vision. 2 See Grace Eckley, Children's Lore in 'Finnegans Wake,' 191-2.

210 3 4 5 6 7 8

Notes to pages 74-9

JJ to Frank Budgen (July 1939), Letters, 1:406. Joyce is misquoted in Eckley, 183. Kevin Sullivan, Joyce among the Jesuits, 10, 83-4 See chapter 4 for another relationship of'where flash becomes word and silents selfloud.' Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, 162-3 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, 70-2 The play on 'dail' should be noted since the allusion to Dail, the Irish parliament, injects a political overtone in the establishment of the context in the pub scene, which will review such matters as famous battles and former Irish kings. It also adds an extra twist of irony to Vaticum cleaners' and Vatican radio. 9 John Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark, 443 10 JJA 54: 145, 184 11 Radar as radio detecting and arranging appears to fit the passage. The idea was not new in 1935, as Robert Watson-Watt had begun work on his project in 1921. This is not to preclude Svatthour' as primarily referring to a standard unit of measurement in electricity. 12 This reference to Vatican radio should be related to the earlier reference to the Dail, since for Joyce the church dominated Ireland as powerfully as the state. It certainly is meant to further act as an introduction reinforcing the political overtones. 13 Roland McHugh, Annotations, 309 14 John Gordon, 'Finnegans Wake': A Plot Summary, 195, citing Margaret Solomon, Eternal Geomater: The Sexual Universe of'Finnegans Wake,' 34 15 Bishop, Joyce s Book of the Dark, 276-9. A diagram of the ear showing its parts and references to them in the Wake is provided on page 278. 16 John Gordon (correspondence, 1995) brought to my attention the possiblity that there is an allusion here to the Warner Brothers Vitaphone sound projection system. The system was developed in 1926 and demonstrated for the first time in 1927. It was used for the historic production of Jazz Story with Al Jolson - the first broadly successful commercial 'talkie.' The system was dropped in 1931 in favour of the more flexible 'Movietone.' Since this passage was not composed until 1935 (JJA 54:145,180), it would seem likely Joyce played on vitaphone in using Vitaltone.' For details, see Edward Kellogg, 'History of Sound Motion Pictures,' in A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television, 187. 17 Bishop points out how low-powered this battery really is (Joyce's Book of the Dark, 276). 18 It should be noted that 'mole' can also refer to a sea-wall enclosing a harbour or to a growth on the skin, each of which could also refer to HCE. 19 In the Wake (1.4) there is a long passage (76.32-77.7) relating the mole to the launching of a 'thorpeto' (a torpedo). 20 Detailed discussion of the connection of the night of the Wake with the Easter Vigil (Holy Saturday night) and Joyce's views on the pagan connections of its liturgy can be found in chapters 8 and 13.

Notes to pages 79-86

211

21 James Joyce, Critical Writings, 145. For a lengthy discussion of art and imitation, with some differences from Joyces note in the text, see Jacques Aubert, The Aesthetics of James Joyce, 89-93. 22 'In the distance along the course of the slowflowing Liffey slender masts flecked the sky and, more distant still, the dim fabric of the city lay prone in haze. Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man's weariness, the image of the seventh city of Christendom was visible to him across the timeless air, no older nor more weary nor less patient of subjection than in the days of the thingmote' (Portrait of the Artist, 167). 23 Brendan O'Hehir, Classical Lexicon, 10 24 McHugh, Annotations, 13 25 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 237 26 Ibid., 239 27 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 237 28 Cf. 'the propriety codestruces' (108.12). 29 Paul Valery, 'Philosophy of the Dance,' in his Aesthetics, 210-11 30 Ezra Pound, 'How to Read,' in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 25. This seems to confirm why, as the various fragments of Work in Progress were published, Pound became so antagonistic towards Joyce's experimentation. 31 Note that in German this type of labyrinth is named Irrgdrten or Irrweg. Earwigs, if they entered the ear, would presumably find themselves in such a maze. 32 Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 80-4 33 Robert Graves (The White Goddess, 269-70) suggests: 'Thus the spirally-danced Troygame (called the "Crane Dance" in Delos because it was adapted there to the cult of the Moon-Goddess as Crane) has the same origin as thepesach. The case is proved by Homer who wrote: Daedalus in Chossos once contrived A dancing-floor for fair-haired Ariadne — a verse which the scholiast explains as referring to the Labyrinth dance. Lucian in Concerning the Dance, a mine of mythological tradition, gives us the subjects of Cretan dances: "the myths of Europe. Pasiphae, the two Bulls, the Labyrinth, Ariadne, Phaedra [daughter of Pasiphae], Andogeos [son of Minos], Icarus, Glaucus... the magic of Polydius and of Talus ..."' See also Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance, 155. 34 See entry on masques in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 474-5. 35 Ellen Cronan Rose, 'Dancing Daedalus: Another Source for Joyce's Portrait of the Artist' 36 Marshall McLuhan, 'Joyce, Aquinas and the Poetic Process,' in The Literary Criticism of MarshallMcLuhan, 256-9. This article was originally published in 1951. 37 Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 80-4 38 Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark, 199-206. See particularly the charts that Bishop presents of the Indo-European roots *ar- and *leg- (204-5 and 200-1 respectively).

212

Notes to pages 87-97

7: Mimicry, Memory, Mummery, and the Multiplying of Media 1 Indo-European, 'werad,' root or branch, generates Old English 'rot,' and hence modern English, 'root.' This is also the Indo-European root from which 'radical' and 'rhizome' are derived. 2 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, 162 3 See above, chapters 3 and 4. 4 David Hayman, First Draft Version of 'Finnegans Wake'; see also Hayman, The 'Wake' in Transit, and Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, Understanding 'Finnegans Wake.' 5 Deleuze observes, 'Sense is both the expressible and the expressed of the proposition and the attribute of the state of affairs' This section suggests to me that like Jean Gattegno's description of Carroll's books quoted by Deleuze, Joyce's Wake is 'not a story which he tells us, it is a discourse which he addresses to us' (Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 22). For Deleuze's commentary on the Duchess's saying to Alice, 'Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves,' see ibid., 31. 6 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 166—9 7 Rose and O'Hanlon, Understanding 'Finnegans Wake,' 137 8 Roland McHugh, Annotations, 48 9 JJA 47: 448. 'God,' which is in the typescript, is crossed out, and 'Movies' with a captial M written above. On page 397 the editors indicate that this draft was probably made in June 1925. 10 '"Clontarf" means "bull meadow," hence Dungtarf = bullshit' (McHugh, Annotations, 16). 11 Walter Benjamin, Reflections, 336 12 Giabattista Vico, New Science, 699. Richard Elmann (James Joyce, 661n62) cites Frank Budgen (Myselves When Young, 187), to whom Joyce corroborated this as his principle as well. 13 Jonson was an important figure for Joyce. It should be noted that on his first visit to Paris he spent considerable time in the Bibliotheque nationale reading Jonson's Complete Works (Ellmann, James Joyce, 125). 14 Cf.: 'Chest Cee! 'Sdense! Corpo di barragio! you spoof of visiblity in a freakfog ..." 0^48.1-2). 15 See the discussion of 'After sound, light and heat, memory, will and understanding' (FW266.19-20) in chapter 4. 16 The Latin term for Greek, topoi, was loci, the word for place. 17 See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory. Prior to her book on memory, Yates did an extensive study of Giordano Bruno, in which she discussed Bruno's theory of memory. See her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 191-206. 18 See chapter 4. 19 In professional printing, an 'em' is the square of body size of any type used as a unit of measure

Notes to pages 97-104

213

20 St John Perse's work was introduced into English by T.S. Eliot in 1924 with the translation ofAnabase. His first work, Eloges, appeared in 1911. Anabase was concerned with tribal migrations across Asia. 21 It should be noted that the hawk is a member of the order of Falconiformes, as is the vulture. In Freud's analysis of Leonardo da Vinci - a book which Joyce had in his library - the vulture plays a special role in the artist's childhood dream. For an intriguing discussion of vultures, eagles, hawks, and other birds in relation to Joyce and Leonardo, see Jean Kimball, 'Freud, Leonardo and Joyce.' Some references to hawks in Joyce's earlier works: ... a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve ... (Portrait, 169) - Stephaneforos! His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross. (Portrait, 169) A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osierwoven wings, of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet ... (Portrait, 225) Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto? Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus. Pater, ait. Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing be. (W).952-4) 22 John Gordon, 'Marconimasts,' 852-3; John Gordon, 'Notes on Issy,' 6-7 23 S. Giedion, The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Architecture, 27, 44ff, 57, 128ff, 139. Note also that Giedion actually uses the Jute and Mutt passage from FW'm his analysis of'The Vertical and Mythopoeic Thinking.' 24 All discussions of song in the Wake are naturally indebted to the work of Matthew Hodgart and Mabel Worthington, and the later studies by Zack Bowen and Ruth Bauerle listed in the Bibliography. 25 See Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in 'Finnegans Wake.' 8: Secularizing the Sacred: The Art of Profane Illumination 1 For example, in an early letter concerning Joyce, McLuhan identified the closing section of'Circe' in Ulysses with a Black Mass. See Marshall McLuhan, Letters, 183. 2 See chapter 5 for a discussion of the words of consecration, 'Hoc est corpus meum,' and HCE's names - Hocus Pocus Esquilocus. 3 Richard E\\mann, James Joyce, 628

214

Notes to pages 104-13

4 Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality, 85—8, and passim 5 Bloomsday (1904) occurs within the octave of the Feast of Sacred Heart, which is itself the octave of Corpus Christi. Motifs concerning the Sacred Heart recur in Ulysses as well as references to Christ's body (corpus Christi). The importance of Corpus Christi in the Dublin in which Joyce grew up is noted by Stanislaus Joyce in My Brother's Keeper, 81. References in Ulysses to Christ's Body include the following: 'is the genuine christine: body and soul and | blood and ouns' (£71.21-2); 'and Valentine, | spurning Christ's terrene body, and the' (£71.658—9); 'two or four | eyes conversing, Christus or Bloom his name is'(£716.1091-2). References to the Sacred Heart include: 'The Sacred Heart that is: showing it. Heart on his sleeve' (£76.954); 'slowly, moaning desperately) O Sacred Heart of Jesus, | have' (£715.32); 'Save him from hell, O Divine Sacred Heart!' (£715.33); 'and a celluloid doll fall out.) | Sacred Heart of Mary, where' (£715.289-90); 'Messenger of the Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph' (£715.1125); 'jersey on which an image of the Sacred Heart is stitched'(£715.4449-50). 6 Stanislaus Joyce, quoted in ELlmann, James Joyce, 578 7 Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper: James Joyce's Early Years, 103-4 8 Eugene Jolas, 'My Friend James Joyce,' in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, 8 9 Henry Morton Robinson, 'Hardest Crux Ever,' in Magalaner, ed., A James Joyce Miscellany (Second Series), 205—6 10 Chapter 11 will explore in detail the relation of'dime' and time. Note the association with 'alms' and 'arms.' 11 The counterpointing of the scientific against the pragmatically religious theories of light establishes a crucial parameter for Joyce's linking the modern and the most ancient, for within Catholicism light and fire as a heritage of primitive mystery religion receives special emphasis in a number of liturgical celebrations, including two of those derived from pre-Christian mysteries: the Feast of the Epiphany and the ceremonies of the three days prior to the Feast of the Resurrection, the triduum, which culminates with the Easter Vigil. After Joyce's apostasy, these were the only three days in the liturgical calendar on which he attended services at a Roman Catholic church. Jacques Mercanton cites a remark Joyce made to him when he met the author at the moment of the blessing of the baptismal font, which follows the lighting of the paschal candle at an Easter Vigil service. As the ceremony of blessing concluded and Holy Saturday Mass began, Joyce turned towards him and remarked, 'I have seen the rebirth of fire and water. Enough until next year. The rest is without interest.' Previously he had explained to Mercanton that 'Good Friday and Holy Saturday were the two days of the year he went to Church for the liturgies, which represented by their symbolic rituals the oldest mysteries of humanity.' See Potts, ed., Portraits of the Artist in Exile, 214. 12 'On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of unreason, lies, naked, fettered, a chalice resting on her swollen belly. Father Malachi O'Flynn in a lace petticoat and reversed

Notes to pages 114-18

13 14 15 16 17 18

215

chasuble, his two left feet back to the front, celebrates camp mass. The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a plain cassock and mortarboard, his head and collar back to the front, holds over the celebrant's head an open umbrella' (£715.4691-7). 'Haveth Childers Everywhere' was Joyce's working title for this section when it was published in transition as one part of Work in Progress. 'Exuberant' does not appear in the early drafts of the King Roderick portrait. See David Hayman, ed., A First Draft Version ..., 203-4. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, 78-89 Jacques Mercanton, 'The Hours of James Joyce,' in Potts, ed., Portraits of the Artist in Exile, 221 See John Bishop's important discussion of Freud, Vico, and Joycean etymology in Joyce's Book of the Dark, 195-206. Lorraine Weir, Writing Joyce, 54-81; Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark, 174-209

9: Assembling and Tailoring a Modern Hermetic Techno-Cultural Allegory 1 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 208. Subsequent references in this paragraph appear in the text. 2 Ibid., 180, 191 3 Mary Reynolds, Joyce and Dante, 149-74. For Bruno on allegory, see Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, 73-7. (It should be noted that this was originally published in 1927.) Bruno's allegory must be seen in the more complex aspect of his hermeticism, which Frances Yates (Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 211—14) relates to his seeing himself as an Egyptian. Vico comments on allegory in New Science, §§34, 235, 403. 4 Cf. Benjamin: 'The critical instant [Nu] becomes the now [fetzt] of contemporary, actuality; the symbolic becomes distorted into the allegorical' (Origin, 183). 5 Quintilian, Institutes, viii.6.44ff 6 McHugh calls attention to the use of the sigla in chapter 6 (see The Sigla of'Finnegans Wake,' 32). McHugh's list below is from Add. MS 47473, 133b (first draft of 1.6, which appears in JJA, 47, 28): 1 2

3 4 X

5 6 7 8 9

S K O o 0

216

Notes to pages 119-23

10 11 12 Compare vfithJJA 47, 2. 7 David Hayman, The 'Wake'in Transit, 12. Hayman suggests that the Letter/Word might characterize the whole text, being the account given in a darkened feminine discourse of the divine and (presumably) male absence/presence and suggests that 1.6 rhetorically profiles or fingerprints the entities for which shorthand symbols or 'sigla' had already been established — in so doing, Joyce orients the reader towards a larger semi/mock/ metaphysical allegory of universal presence. 8 Peter Burger, Theory oftheAvant-Garde, 68-73 9 Vico, New Science, §403; also §210. Hayman points out that Joyce's notes 'elaborated not characters but a cast of metaphors that would play like coloured lights on the surface of the mind' (Wake in Transit, 129). 10 The literal translation of'allegory.' See, for example, Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 4-6. I l l detect a subliminal play on allegory in the passage. When Shaun is claiming that he could be a better poet than his brother Shem, he identifies Shem's style as the 'allergrossest transfusiasm' (425.15; largest of all enthusiasm [i.e., Ger., allergrb'sste + allegorical + trans + fusion]) saying that 'I can sororquise the Siamanish better than most' (425.15— 16). 12 Hayman, The 'Wake'in Transit, 166 13 David Hayman, First Draft, 84 14 'And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning. Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel' (Ezekiel 1.14-16). 15 Compare this with the use of passages from the prophetic books in Ulysses. 16 In 1869 in England solid rubber tires mounted on steel rims were introduced in a new machine, which was the first to be patented under the modern name bicycle. In 1873 James Starley, an English inventor, produced the first machine incorporating most of the features of the high-wheel bicycle. See also Eyal Amiran, Wandering and Home, chapter 7. 17 It should also be noted that French, piste cyclcable, is a 'bicycle track' (Roland McHugh, Annotations, 99). 18 For a discussion of the introduction of the phrase 'dream factory' in film criticism, see chapter 4, note 20. 19 Roland McHugh, The 'Finnegans Wake'Experience, 19-20

Notes to pages 125-32

217

20 The phrase is borrowed from Gilles Deluze, where he applies it to Bergson (Dialogues, 15). 21 The concept of orthographical figures appeared shortly after the appearance of print (e.g., Puttenham, Spenser's debate with Harvey concerning the standardization of orthography), but it was not codified into rhetorical manuals until the eighteenth century. This seems an important area for Joyce studies, in light of Joyce's hyperconsciousness of print and of playing with spelling. 22 'Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written. And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians' (Daniel 5.24-8). 23 Based on Richard Robinson, The Buddhist Religion, 20-2. It is important to note the differences from the cycle cited in McHugh, Annotations, 16. Robinson points out that the item on the six senses is often left out. It should also be noted that Joyce's way of laying it out substantially alters the order. Neither Robinson's nor Joyces list ends with 'ignorance,' but Joyce in ending with becoming, as 'entails the ensuance of existentiality,' seems to change the intent. The Joycean order seems to deliberately revise the Viconian order of'live und laughed ant loved end left.' 24 In view of the importance of the theme of the 'hieroglyphs of engined egypsians,' it is worth noting Benjamin's discussion of allegory and hieroglyphics in The Origins of German Tragic Drama, 168—70. 25 See above chapter 4. 10: The Rhythmatick of Our Eternal Geomater 1 Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 5 2 Phillip F. Herring, ed., Joyce's 'Ulysses'Notesheets in the British Museum, 474 3 Craig Adcock discusses this in considerable detail in Marcel Duchamp s Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis. 4 Thomas Cowan, 'St Humphrey as Tesseract,' 19 5 Fritz Senn, 'The Aliments of Jumeantry,' 51-4 6 See Adelaide Glasheen, A Third Census of'Finnegans Wake' under the specific entries. 7 The enthusiastic reception of Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid, marked by its award of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1980, indicates the marked change brought about by research into artificial intelligence and neural networks. 8 C.K. Ogden and LA. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 88-90. It should be noted that the first edition was published in London in 1923; the second appeared in 1926. This work is mentioned in the Wake as noted earlier.

218

Notes to pages 132-42

9 Joyce wanted J.W.N. Sullivan, the author of The Limitations of Science, a mathematician, musician, and literary critic, whom Einstein had described as one of the few men in England who understood the theory of relativity, to write an extended essay on mathematics in the Wake. When Sullivan refused, Joyce then suggested C.K. Ogden. In bothcases, he appears to have been intrigued by their interests in mathematics, the arts, and language, since Ogden was a psychologist, semiotician, and logician with some knowledge of mathematics as well. 10 Mentions of Descartes ('Cartesian springs' [301.25]), Etienne Bezouts ('bezouts' [301.28]), and Pascal ('pascal's kondyl' [302.3]) underline the relationship to mathematics. 11 Frank Budgen, Making of 'Ulysses,' 257 12 JJ to Claude Sykes (n.d., spring 1921), Letters, 1:164 13 JJ to Frank Budgen (end of February 1921), Letters, 1:160 14 JJ to Budgen, quoted in Making of'Ulysses,' 262 15 Sir Arthur Eddington, New Pathways in Science, 218. This book contains a series of lectures that Eddington originally delivered at Cornell in 1934. 16 Karl Friedrich Gauss is mentioned in conjunction with the 'gause meter' (a play on gas meter), since it is used to measure the number of'gaussian units' of electrical and magnetic quantities. Gaussian units are used in relativity theory and particle physics. 17 Robert Oserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos, 46-9 18 See Margaret C. Solomon, Eternal Geomater: The Sexual Universe of'Finnegans Wake.' 19 Oserman, Poetry of the Universe, 90—1. Joyceans will probably be interested in Oserman's speculation that Dante's vision in the Commedia is that of a hypersphere. A hypersphere or spherical sphere is a sphere raised to a higher dimension. 20 Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Godel's Proof, 1-12 21 The calculations and other details are worked out in Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, Understanding 'Finnegans Wake,' 153, I6ln5; and in Roland McHugh, Annotations, 285-6. 22 Joyce encountered the axioms of Peano in Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 5-6. See Phillip F. Herring, ed., Joyce's Notes and Early Drafts for 'Ulysses': Selections from the Buffalo Collection, 106-7. Peano is particularly mentioned in 1. 47, p. 106. 23 For a discussion of this, see Hofstadter, Gbdel, Escher, Bach. 24 According to Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Historical Slang, to 'grub' is to eat, and to 'mug,' to drink, but also to study hard. 11: The New Techno-Culture of Space-Time 1 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. For Lewis and Joyce, see pages 26-7. 2 Apollinaire's observations are quoted in chapter 3.

Notes to pages 143-51

219

3 Hugh Kenner, Dublin's Joyce, 362-9 4 Donald Theall, The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror, 193-5. McLuhan was lecturing on this aspect of the Joyce-Lewis controversy in the early 1950s, well before Kenner's book appeared. This is corroborated in letters from Marshall McLuhan to Wyndham Lewis in 1953. In a letter of 1 September 1953, McLuhan wrote to Lewis pointing out that Kenner was a student of his 'who got his introduction to your work via myself.' After a special issue ofShenandoah appeared in 1953, McLuhan wrote again on 16 October, noting 'I hasten to withdraw what I said about Kenner seeing eye to eye with me. His Joyce enthusiasm has carried him a long way toward die time-cult. But apart from that there is the appalling manner and writing' (Marshall McLuhan, Letters, 238, 240). 5 Wyndham Lewis, Childermass, 172-80. But there are numerous other references throughout, particularly to the space-time aspect of Joyce. 6 Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, 133-4 7 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of 'Ulysses', 129. See chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion of Joyce's sense of'social time.' 8 H.W. Sweet, New English Grammar, I, 99, §278 9 For Eco, McLuhan, and Derrida, see the Bibliography. Deleuze uses Joyce directly in speaking about communication in Proust and Signs. He and Guattari also mention this in Anti-Oedipus. While Joyce is not specifically mentioned, Deleuze s use of Bergson in relation to film closely parallels Joyce. For Deleuze's theory of the time-image, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. In view of the interplay of repetition and difference as a theme in the Wake, it is interesting to note what Deleuze suggests about the role of communication in Difference and Repetition, 277. 10 See Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form; and Richard Cavell, 'Spatial Form," in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, 629-31. 11 This term describes the type of phenomenon by which we know something about the nature of a 'slithy tove' because of the phono-aesthetic associations that such phonetic combinations as /si-/ evoke (i.e., slippery, slimy, slithery, etc.). The term is borrowed from J.R. Firth, 'Modes of Meaning,' in Papers in Linguistics, 1934—51, 194; and J.R. Firth, Speech, 49-54. 12 John Bishop (Joyce's Book of the Dark, 162—3) provides a map of the 'Neuropean' world, which indicates how the dreamer's body can be mapped as a European world. While all its details may not be equally as convincing, it does show generally how such a pattern works in particular parts of the Wake. 13 Roland McHugh, Annotations, 460 14 See Donald Theall, 'Beyond the Orality/LiteraryDichotomy: James Joyce and the PreHistory of Cyberspace.' 15 Term coined from Joyce's portmanteau form 'ambiviolent' 16 Cf. Bloom in Ulysses, 17.1674-8. See discussion in chapter 3. 17 Lorraine Weir, Writing Joyce, 2, 63, 68; Brendan O'Hehir, Classical Lexicon, 506

220

Notes to pages 154-67

12: Cultural Production and the Dynamic Mechanics of Quanta and the Chaosmos 1 Quantum mechanics, the final mathematical formulation of the quantum theory, was developed during the 1920s. In 1924 Louis de Broglie proposed that particles exhibit wave-like properties. Two different formulations of quantum mechanics were then presented: the wave mechanics of Erwin Schrodinger (1926) involves the use of a mathematical entity, the wave function, which is related to the probability of finding a particle at a given point in space; the matrix mechanics of Werner Heisenberg (1925) makes no mention of wave functions or similar concepts but was shown to be mathematically equivalent to Schrodinger's theory. 2 Louis de Broglie, The Revolution in Physics, 100 3 Note the discussion of the theory of relativity and abstract machines in Gilles Deleuze and Fdix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 511. 4 John Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark, 148 5 William Stephenson, 'William James, Niels Bohr and Complementarity: II — Pragmatics of Thought,' Psychological Record 36 (1986), 529-43. This British psychologist and founder of Q-theory, who discusses this example from James in expounding a theory of complementarity with respect to meaning, also presented papers on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, which are in the archives at the University of Missouri/Columbia. 6 Jacques Mercanton, 'The Hours of James Joyce,' in Portraits of the Artist in Exile, 207 7 Ibid., 208 8 Cf. Roderick O'Connor as the 'pre-electric' king. 9 The rhetorical term 'thesis' and the mathematical 'hypothesis' are obviously two of the lexemes implied in this portmanteau. 10 Cf. 190.9, where Justius (Shaun) speaks of Shem's productions as 'your new irish stew.' 11 Maurice Horn, ed., The World Encyclopedia of Comics, 161-2; George Perry and Alan Aldridge, The Penguin Book of Comics, 47—50 12 For example, in addition to 342.31, cited elsewhere in the text: 'The charges are, you will remember, the chances are, you won't' (254.23); 'It might have been what you call your change of my life but there's the chance of a night for my lifting' (318.36— 319.1). 13 The parody of Julius Caesar (3.2.28) is noteworthy here: 'There is tears for his fortune, honour for his valour and death for his ambition.' 14 In commenting on Ulysses in a discussion in the electronic discussion group Postmodern Talk, Derek Attridge noted the etymological connection of 'co-incidere' to 'falling together.' Subsequently, Attridge has published his observations about this in 'The Postmodernity of Joyce: Chance, Coincidence and the Reader,' in Joyce Studies Annual 1995, 10-18. The approach in this article is complementary to the discussion of these questions in this chapter. While this appears to stress that there is a 'falling together' which produces an indeterminate, but still 'significant,' reconstruction, such indeterminacy

Notes to pages 168-75

221

does not sidestep or bypass intersubjective participation in knowledge, for Joyce clearly construes the serendipitous as another form of knowledge. 15 Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach, 691-3, 709-19 13: The Relativities of Light, Colour, and Sensory Perception 1 Milton speaks of the Phoenix as 'a secular bird ages of lives' (Samson Agonistes, 1707), referring to Ovid's Metamorphoses, 15.395 ('haec ubi quinque suae complevit saecula vitae'). Joyce picks up the term and plays on its derived but earliest English meaning of belonging to the world and not to the Church or religion, hence the everyday. It should be noted that there is also a muted pun in Milton's original usage. 2 Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in 'Finnegans Wake,' 225 3 Maurice Horn, ed., The World Encyclopedia of Comics, 657-8 4 See chapter 8 for further remarks about Tenebrae. 5 While triduum means any three days of special religious observance in preparation for a feast and, as McHugh points out (Annotations, 97, 517), 'A triduum before our Larry's own day' could refer to 11 November, Armistice Day, the end of the First World War, for it is three days before the Feast of Saint Lawrence O'Toole, it has also been noted that 'Larry' can be a form of'Lord,' thus indicating three days before Our Lord's own day. The OED notes in defining triduum 'esp. in the R. C. Ch., the last three days of Lent.' It should be noted these three days held particular importance for the former Catholic, Joyce, which clearly suggests he would likely use the phrase to refer to those three days as well as playing on its meaning of any three days of religious observance. Saturnalia took place over a three-day period from 17 December to 19 December. My suggestion is that it is possible to take the use of 'triduum' in the Wake to be a question of 'born ... and' not 'either ... or.' 6 See chapter 8 for a discussion of the Exsultet. 7 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 149-50 8 Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, 29-41 9 David Hayman The Wake in Transit, 33—4 10 Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, Understanding 'Finnegans Wake,' 322 11 JJ to Frank Budgen (20 Aug. 1939), Letters, 1:406 12 JJ to George and Helen Joyce (19 Feb. 1935), Letters, 3:345-6 13 George Polti's book, which had fascinated Schiller and Goethe, both of whom tried to find more dramatic situations, would have appealed to Joyces curiosity. Ellmann indicates that it was in Joyce's library (see Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce}. The current allusion to it is to be credited to Jorn Barger, who mentioned Polti in an e-mail note on FWAKE-L, reminding me of its relevance to Joyce. I first encountered this book in 1954 before I knew that Joyce had had it in his library. Marshall McLuhan told me about it and gave me a copy, suggesting he thought it important to what Joyce was

222

14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21

Notes to pages 175-9

about. While I had not tried to relate it systematically to Joyce, I always diought that it probably was a source book. In the introduction to the English translation, the translator describes it as 'a thought engine, an engine that even Goethe and Gozzi would have used to burnish their conceptions of life.' Barger raised the question of how the Archdruid-Patrick encounter could fit into Polti's classification. It quite clearly is tied up with Fold's dramatic situation, no. 12: 'Obtaining: A Solicitor and an Adversary Who Is Refusing, or an Arbitrator and Opposing Parties.' Of the three subsets that Polti identifies under no. 12, subset B is 'Endeavour by Means of Persuasive Eloquence Alone" and subset C is 'Eloquence with an Arbitrator.' Certainly the debate involves persuasive eloquence with an arbitrator, the High King Leary (in the background we have Shem and Shaun arguing their claims before HCE as father). The encounter certainly meets the requirements Polti suggests: 'What mines may be sprung, what countermines discovered! what unexpected revolts of submissive instruments! This dialectic context which arises between reason and passion, sometimes subtile and persuasive, sometimes forceful and violent' (Polti, 46). He also relates this 'obtaining' to the 'Temptation of Saint Anthony.' Flaubert's version of the Temptation is a key book for Joyce and central to the 'Circe' section of Ulysses. Brendan O'Hehir, Classical Lexicon, 500 And, of course, the smoke coming from the chimney in the Vatican at the election of a new Pope! 'Tune' is usually used to denominate that page in The Book of Kelts that contains words from the section of the book of Matthew in the New Testament describing The Passion according to Saint Matthew (the Gospel for Palm Sunday): 'Then were crucified with him two thieves.' See Edward Sullivan, Book ofKells, 84, plate XI. Adelaide Glasheen, Third Census of 'Finnegans Wake' Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 103-7 Ibid., 114-18 'Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality, the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany' (S//213). Rose and O'Hanlon, Understanding 'Finnegans Wake,' 325. The relevant text is to be found at VLB. 14, 48. The Scotus mentioned by Rose could be either John Scotus Erigena, whose Plotinianism could be represented by the Archdruid; or it could as easily

Notes to pages 179-86

22 23 24

25 26 27

223

represent Duns Scotus, whose essentialism and doctrine of hecceity are represented by the Archdruid. It is most likely Duns Scotus was intended in this note, for the opposition between Scotist and Thomist was well recognized among the Jesuits; in fact, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had taught at the Jesuit College, had employed the Scotistic concept of hecceity in his sprung verse. For a Jesuit-trained student, the recognition of the opposition of John Duns Scotus to Thomas Aquinas would be very likely. Rose cites VI.B.2.95 for Scotus Erigena, citing a note about the Irish knowing Greek. However, this does not appear in VI.B.2.95 of the Archives, though I am sure it does appear somewhere in the notebooks. Incidentally, note JJ s notebook entry "The Deity in itself.' McHugh, Annotations, 611 While 'paralogic' can be defined philosophically as faulty or flawed logic, it is defined rhetorically as synonymous with paromologia, which Lanham defines as 'conceding a point either from a conviction of its truth or to use it to strengthen one's own argument; giving away a weak point in order to take a stronger' (Richard Lanham A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 110). The OED cites a quote from 1859 that a paralogic being is a maze of contradictions. But in the early twentieth century, the term 'paralog' was being used for a nonsense word. In view of the Archdruid's gnostic-hermetic-idealistic persona, yet also his affinity with contemporary physics and mathematics, Joyce seems in part to think of'paralogical' etymologically as 'beyond reason.' It is perhaps relevant at this point to remember Ezra Pound's use of this mythological moment in describing Joyce's activity in writing Ulysses. See related entries in John S. Farmer and WE. Henley, Dictionary of Slang; also Eric Partridge, Dictionary of Historical Slang. Joyce dictated to Frank Budgen information about the triptych. See McHugh, Annotations, 613.

14: Conclusion 1 Donald F. Theall and Joan B. Theall, 'Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce: Beyond Media,' 46 2 William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 16 3 William Gibson, Neuromancer, 51 4 Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the Twenty-First Century, 103. This posthumously published work was edited and rewritten from McLuhan s working notes, which had to date from the late 1970s since he died in 1981. McLuhan s words were written more than a decade before their posthumous publication in 1989. 5 Stuart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT 6 Marshall McLuhan, The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 385

224

Notes to pages 186-9

7 'The Large Glass is an illuminated manuscript consisting of 476 documents; the illumination consists of almost every work that Duchamp did' (Craig E. Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis, 28). 8 Brand, Media Lab 9 A further paper needs to be written on the way in which synaesthesia as well as coenaesthesia participate in the prehistory of cyberspace. The unfolding history of poets and artists confronting electro-mechanical techno-culture, which begins in the 1850s, reveals a growing interest in synaesthesia and coenaesthesia and parallels a gradually accelerating yearning for artistic works which are syntheses or orchestrations of the arts. By 1857 Charles Baudelaire intuited the future transformational power of the coming of electrocommunication when he established his concept of synaesthesia and the trend towards a synthesis of all the arts as central aspects of symbolisme. The transformational matrices involved in synaesthesia and the synthesis of the arts unconsciously respond to that digitalization implicit in Morse code and telegraphy, anticipating how one of the major characteristics of cyberspace will be the capability of transforming all modes of expression into minimal discrete contrastive units - bits. This assertion concerning Baudelaire's use of synaesthesia is developed from Benjamin's discussions of Baudelaire. The role of shock in Baudelaire's poetry, which links the 'Correspondances' with 'La Vie Ante"rieure,' also reflects how the modern fragmentation involved in 'Le Cr^puscule du Soir' and 'Le Cre"puscule du Matin' is reassembled poetically through the verbal transformation of sensorial modes. This is the beginning of a period in which the strategy of using shock to deal with fragmentation is transformed into seeing the multiplicity of codifications of municipal (or urban) reality. So when the metamorphic sensory effects of nature's temple are applied to the splenetic here and now, in the background is the emergence of the new codifications of reality, such as the photography which so preoccupied Baudelaire, and telegraphy, which had an important impact in his lifetime. 10 While in one sense the dreamer is identified as the male HCE, the book opens and closes with the feminine voice of ALP. It is her dream of his dreaming, or is it his dream of her dreaming? Essentially, it is androgynous, with a mingling of male and female voices throughout. For another treatment of the male-female theme in the Wake, see Suzette Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. 11 This motif will be developed further below. It relates to Joyce's interest in Lewis Carroll. Gilles Deleuze comments extensively on manducation in The Logic of Sense. 12 See John Dewey, Art as Experience; and Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. 13 Cf. McLuhan and Powers, Global Village, 182. 14 Alexander Marschak, The Roots of Civilization; Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher, Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, Mathematics and Culture; Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship

Notes to pages 190-4

225

15 For detailed discussion of the treatment of the ear and hearing in Finnegans Wake, see John Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark, chapter 9 ('Earwickerwork'), 264-304. 16 Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions: 1937—1952, 6-9 17 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe 18 Bishop, Joyce s Book of the Dark, 264-304 19 Eugene Jolas, 'My Friend James Joyce,' in Givens, ^A.., James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, 24 20 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory 21 JJ to Harriet Shaw Weaver (postcard, 16 April 1927), Letters, 1:251 22 For a discussion of this, see Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, chapter 3 ('Memory as Virtual Co-existence'), 51-72. 23 Speaking of the all-embracing aspects of virtual reality and cyberspace, Baudrillard's 'simulation' and 'the ecstasy of communication' should be noted. This issue is too complex and tangential to the argument to engage in here. In approaching it, however, it is important to realize the degree of similarity that Baudrillard's treatment of communication shares with McLuhan's. In many ways, I believe it could be established that what Baudrillard critiques as the 'ecstasy of communication' is his understanding of McLuhan's vision of communication divorced from its historical roots in the literature and arts of symbolisme, high modernism, and particularly James Joyce. 24 The word cybernetics was introduced in 1948 by Norbert Wiener. 25 This is a major theme of Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan's The Laws of Media. 26 See Donald F. Theall, The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror: Understanding McLuhan.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography

Adcock, Craig E. Marcel Duchamp s Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1983 Amiran, Eyal. Wandering and Home. Pittsburg: Pennsylvania State University 1993 Aristotle. Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. Ed. and trans. S.H. Butcher. 4th ed. New York: Dover Publications 1951 Ascher, Marcia, and Robert Ascher. Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, Mathematics and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1982 Atherton, James. The Books at the Wake. London: Faber 1959 Attridge, Derek. 'The Postmodernity of Joyce: Chance, Coincidence, and the Reader.' In Joyce Studies Annual: 1995. Ed. Thomas F. Staley. Austin: University of Texas Press 1995 Aubert, Jacques. The Aesthetics of James Joyce. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1992 Bacon, Francis. 'The Wisdom of the Ancients.' In The Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral of Francis Bacon. Chicago: Homewood Publishing Co. 1883. 299-302 Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Vol. 1 of University of Texas Press Slavic Series. Austin: University of Texas Press 1981 - Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1968 Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang 1979 - The Semiotic Challenge. New York: Hill and Wang 1988 - 'Structural Activity.' In Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press 1972 Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights 1986 - Inner Experience. State University of New York Series Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press 1988

228 -

Bibliography

Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939. Ed. Alan Stoekel. Trans. Alan Sroekel, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Theory and History of Literature, Vol 14. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1985 Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres completes. Present^ et annote" par Claude Pichois [avec la collaboration de Jen Ziegler]. Bibliotheque de la Pleiade; 1,7. Paris: Gallimard 1975-6 Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. Trans. Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. New York: Columbia University Press 1988 - Fatal Strategies. Trans. Philip Beitchman and WG.J. Niesluchowski. New York: Semiotext(e) 1990 - Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. New York: Columbia University Press 1983 Bauerle, Ruth, ed. The James Joyce Songhook. New York: Garland 1982 Beckett, Samuel, et al. Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. 1929; rpt, London: Faber and Faber 1972 Begnal, Michael H., and Fritz Senn, eds. A Conceptual Guide to 'Finnegans Wake. 'University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1974 Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt Brace and World 1968 - One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: NLB 1979 — The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. 1928; English trans., London: NLB 1977 — Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1978 - Understanding Brecht. Trans. Anna Bostock. 1966; English trans., London: NLB 1973 Benstock, Bernard. Joyce-Again's Wake: An Analysis of'Finnegans Wake'. Seattle: University of Washington Press 1965 Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. 1911; rpt, New York: Macmillan 1912 Bishop, John. Joyce's Book of the Dark: 'Finnegans Wake. 'Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1986 Borges, Jorge Luis. Other Inquisitions: 1937—1952. Trans. Ruth L.C. Simms. New York: Simon and Schuster 1964 Bosanquet, Bernard. A History of Aesthetics. 2nd ed. New York: Humanities Press 1966 Boswell, James. The Life of Johnson. New York: Modern Library / Random House, n.d. Bowen, Zack. Musical Allusions in the Work of James Joyce: Early Poetry through 'Ulysses.' Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1975 Brand, Stewart. The Media Lab. New York: Viking 1987 Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Ed. and trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang 1966

Bibliography

229

Broglie, Louis de. The Revolution in Physics: A Non-Mathematical Survey of Quanta. Trans. Ralph W. Niemeyer. New York: Greenwood Press 1969 Brown, Richard. James Joyce and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

1985 Budgen, Frank.. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses.' Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1960 Biirger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. Indianapolis: BobbMerrill (Library of Liberal Arts) 1965 Butor, Michel. Introduction aux fragments de 'Finnegans Wake.' Paris: Gallimard 1962 Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press 1987 Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Hen Teufelsdrockh. Ed. Charles Frederick Harrold. New York: Odysses Press 1937 Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Donald J. Gray. New York: W.W. Norton 1971 Cassirer, Ernst. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Trans. Mario Domandi. New York: Harper and Row Torchbook 1964 Cavell, Richard. 'Spatial Form.' In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms. Ed. Irene R. Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993. 629-31 Chipp, Herschel B. Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press 1968 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Ed. J. Shawcross. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press 1907 Cowan, Thomas. 'St Humphrey as Tesseract.' James Joyce Neivslitter. 10.2 (1973) Crump, Marjorie. The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1931 Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1981 — Structuralist Poetics. London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul 1975 Curtius, Robert Ernst. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard Trask. Bollingen Series, vol. 36. New York: Pantheon 1948 Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books 1988 — Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986 - Cinema 2: The Time-Image Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989

230 Bibliography - Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. 1968; English trans., New York: Columbia University Press 1994 - The Logic of Seme. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia University Press 1990 — Proust and Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: George Braziller 1972 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking Press 1977 - A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1987 Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press 1987 Deming, Robert H., ed. James Joyce: The Critical Heritage. Vol. 2 (1928-41). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1970 Descartes, Rene", and Paul Vale'ry. The Living Thoughts of Descartes. London: Cassell and Company 1948 Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: G.P. Putnam 1958 Dryden, John. Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays. 2 vols. Ed. George Watson. Everyman's Library. London: Dent 1964 Eckley, Grace. Children's Lore in 'Finnegans Wake.' Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1985 Eco, Umberto. The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. Trans. Ellen Esrock. Tulsa, Okla.: University of Tulsa Press 1982 — The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. Trans. Hugh Bredin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1988 - The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press 1984 - Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press 1986 Eddington, Sir Arthur. The Expanding Universe. 1933; rpt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1952 - New Pathways in Science. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1959 Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983 Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form. Ed. and trans. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt Brace 1949 Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber 1944 - Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace 1932 Ellmann, Richard. The Consciousness of Joyce. 1977; rpt, New York: Oxford University P 1981 - James Joyce. New and revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1983 - Ulysses on the Liffey. Oxford: Oxford University Press Farmer, John S., and W.E. Henley. Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English. Abridged ed. London: George Routledge and Sons n.d.

Bibliography

231

Firth, J.R. 'Modes of Meaning.' In Papers in Linguistics, 1934—51. London: Oxford University Press 1957 - Speech. London: Benn 1930 Frank, Joseph. The Idea of Spatial Form. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1991 — 'Spatial Form in Modern Literature.' In Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgement. Ed. Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon MacKenzie. New York: Harcourt, Brace 1948. 379-92. (Originally appeared in The Sewanee Review [1945]) Frye, H. Northrop. The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1957 Gelb, I.J. A Study of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1963 Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1994 Gibson, William. Mona Lisa Overdrive. New York: Bantam Paperback 1989 - Neuromancer. New York: Ace Science Fiction 1984 Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1990 Giedion, Sigfried. The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Architecture. Bollingen Series 35.6.11. New York: Pantheon Books 1964 - Mechanization Takes Command. New York: W. W. Norton 1969 - Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1954 Giedion-Welcker, Carola. 'Meetings with Joyce.' In Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans. Ed. Willard Potts. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1986 - 'On Joyce's Experiment (1929).' Trans. Eugene Jolas. transition 19-20 (June 1930), 174— 83. Rpt in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage. Vol. 2 (1928-41). Ed. Robert H. Deming. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1970. 495-9 - 'On Ulysses (1928).' In Deming, ed. James Joyce: The Critical Heritage. 2: 437-43 Gifford, Don. ' Ulysses' Annotated. Berkeley: University of California Press 1989 Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce's 'Ulysses. 'London: Faber and Faber 1952 Gimpel.Jean. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages. 1976; rpt, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin 1981 Givens, Seon, ed. James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism. New York: Vanguard Press 1948 Glasheen, Adaline. Third Census of'Finnegans Wake. 'Berkeley: University of California Press

1977 Gordon, John. 'Finnegans Wake': A Plot Summary. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1986 - 'Maiconimasts.' James Joyce Quarterly 27 A (Summer 1990), 82-3 - 'Notes on Issy.' In A Wake Newslitter. Monograph no. 7. Colchester: Wake Newslitter Press, 1982 Graves, Robert. White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. New York: Creative Age Press 1948

232

Bibliography

Groden, Michael. 'Ulysses'in Progress. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1977 Guattari, Felix. 'Machinic Heterogenesis.' In Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Ed. N. Katherine Hayles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1991 Hart, Clive. Structure and Motif in 'Finnegans Wake. 'London: Faber and Faber 1962 Hart, Clive, and David Hayman, eds. James Joyce's 'Ulysses': Critical Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press 1974 Hayman, David, ed. A First Draft Version of Finnegans Wake.' Austin: University of Texas Press 1963 - Joyce etMallarme. Les Cahiers des lettres modernes. Collection confrontations, no. 2. Paris: Lettres modernes 1956 - 'Ulysses': The Mechanics of Meaning. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall 1970 - The 'Wake'in Transit. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1990 Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Mind. Ed. and trans. J.B. Baillie. London: George Allen and Unwin 1949 Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Collins 1977 Helmholtz, Hermann von. Popular Scientific Lectures. Selected and introduced by Morris Kline. New York: Dover 1962 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. 'Etherial Bride and Mechanical Bachelors: Science and Allegory in Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass* Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 4.1 (Winter 1996), 91-120 — 'Italian Futurism and "The Fourth Dimension.'" Art Journal 41 (Winter 1981), 317-23 Henke, Suzette. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1989 Herr, Cheryl. Joyce's Anatomy of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1986 Herring, Phillip E, e&. Joyce's Notes and Early Drafts for 'Ulysses': Selectionsfrom the Buffalo Collection. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia 1977 - Joyce's 'Ulysses'Notesheets in the British Museum. Published for the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia 1972 Hodgart, Matthew, John Caldwell, and Mabel P Worthington. Songs in the Works of James Joyce. New York: Temple University Publication / Columbia University Press 1959 Hofstadter, Douglas. Gb'del, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books 1979 Horn, Maurice, ed. The World Encyclopedia of Comics. New York: Chelsea House, 1976 Jameson, Ffedric. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: University of California Press 1979 Jolas, Eugene. 'My Friend James Joyce.' In James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism. Ed. Seon Givens. New York: Vanguard 1948 Jonson, Ben. The Works ofBenJonson. Ed. C.H. Herford Percy and Evelyn Simpson. Vol. 7. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1947

Bibliography

233

Joyce, James, The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking 1959 - Finnegans Wake. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin 1976 - The James Joyce Archive. General editor Michael Groden. Finnegans Wake and notebook volumes edited by David Hayman and Danis Rose. 63 vols. New York: Garland Publishing 1978 - Letters I. Ed. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking 1957 - Letters II and III. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking 1966 - Poems and Shorter Writings: Including 'Epiphanies,' 'Giacomo Joyce' and 'A Portrait of the Artist. 'Ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson. London: Faber and Faber 1991 - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Viking 1964 - Stephen Hero. A New Edition (from the manuscript in the Harvard College Library, incorporating the additional manuscript pages in the Yale University Library). Ed. Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, and Herbert Cahoon. New York: New Directions 1955 - Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin 1986 Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother's Keeper: James Joyce's Early Years. Ed. Richard Ellmann. Preface byT.S. Eliot. New York: Viking 1958 Kellogg, Edward W. 'History of Sound Motion Pictures.' In A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television. Ed. Raymond Fielding. An anthology from the pages of The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. Berkeley: University of California Press 1967 Kenner, Hugh. Dublin's Joyce. Boston: Beacon Press 1962 - The Mechanic Muse. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987 Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1983 Kershner, R.B. (Brandon). Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1989 Kimball, Jean, 'Freud, Leonardo, and Joyce: The Dimensions of a Childhood Memory.' James Joyce Quarterly 17.2 (Winter 1980), 165-82 Kracauer, Sigfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press 1965 Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press 1980 - La Revolution du langage pottique. Paris: Editions du Seuil 1974 Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley: University of California Press 1968 Lefebvre, Henri. La Vie quotidienne dans la mode moderne. Paris: Gallimard 1968

234

Bibliography

Lernout, Geert. The French Joyce. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press 1990 Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Ed. Rodney Needham. Trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer. Boston: Beacon Press 1969 - The Savage Mind. 1962; English trans., Letchworth, Hertfordshire: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1966 Lewis, Wyndham, ed. Blast. No. 1. Review of the Great English Vortex. June 1914; rpt, Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press 1981 - ed. Blast. No 2. Review of the Great English Vortex. July 1915; rpt, Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press 1981 - Childermass. 1928; rpt, London: Jupiter Books / John Calder 1965 - The Complete Wild Body. Ed. Bernard Lafourcade. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press 1982 - Men without Art. Ed. Seamus Cooney. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press 1987 - Time and Western Man. London: Chatto and Windus 1927 Litz, A. Walton. The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake.' London: Oxford University Press 1961 Lowry, Malcolm. Selected Letters. Ed. Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry. Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott 1965 MacArthur, Tom. Worlds of Reference: Lexicography, Learning and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986 Magalaner, Marvin, ed. A James Joyce Miscellany (Second Series). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1959 Mallarme', Ste"phane. Oeuvres completes. Paris: Bibliotheque de La Pleiade 1945 Manganiello, Dominic. Joyce's Politics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1980 Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. New York: Random House 1955 Marschak, Alexander. The Roots of Civilization. New York:McGraw Hill 1982 McHugh, Roland. Annotations to 'Finnegans Wake.' Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1980 - The 'Finnegans Wake'Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press 1981 - The Sigla of'Finnegans Wake. 'London: Edward Arnold 1976 McLuhan, Marshall. 'Joyce, Aquinas and the Poetic Process.' In The Literary Criticism of MarshallMcLuhan 1943/1962. Ed. Eugene McNamara. New York: McGraw Hill 1969. 256-9 - 'Joyce, Mallarme' and the Press.' In The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 19431 1962. Ed. Eugene McNamara. New York: McGraw Hill 1969. 5-21 - The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Ed. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press 1987 McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. The Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1988 McLuhan, Marshall, and Bruce C. Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in World

Bibliography

235

Life and Media in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Oxford University Press

1989 Mercanton, Jacques. 'The Hours of James Joyce.' In Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans. Ed. Willard Potts. 1979; rpt, New York: A Harvest / HBJ Book 1986 Milton, John. Samson Agonistes. Oxford: Oxford University Press I960 Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo. Vision in Motion. New York: Paul Theobald 1947 Nagel, Ernest, and James R. Newman. Godel's Proof. New York: New York University Press 1958 Newman, John Kevin. The Classical Epic Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1986 Ogden, C.K., and LA. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning. 2nd ed. 1926; rpt, New York: Harcourt Brace 1947 O'Hehir, Brendan. A Classical Lexicon to 'Finnegans Wake': And Glossary for Joyce's Other Works. Berkeley: University of California Press 1967 Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 1967 Oserman, Robert. Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos. New York: Doubleday 1995 Ovid. Metamorphoses. 2 vols. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1916 Panofsky, Erwin. Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. Cleveland: World Publishing 1963 Partridge, Eric. Dictionary of Historical Slang. Abridged. Ed. Jacqueline Simpson. Harmon dsworth, Middlesex: Penguin 1972 Pater, Walter. The Renaissance. 1873; rpt. New York: Random House n.d. Perry, George, and Alan Aldridge. Penguin Book of Comics. 1967; rev. ed. London: Alan Lane / The Penguin Press 1971 Phillipson, Michael. In Modernity's Wake: The Ameurunculus Letters. London: Routledge 1989 Plotnitsky, Arkady. Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press 1994 Polti, George. The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations. New York: The Writer Inc. 1940 Pope, Alexander. The Dunciad. Ed. James Sutherland. London: Methuen 1953 - Pastoral Poetry and 'Essay on Criticism.' Ed. Audra E. Williams and Aubrey Williams. Vol. 1 of Twickenham Editions. London: Methuen 1961 Potts, Willard, ed. Portraits of the Artist in Exile. 1979; rpt, New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book 1986 Pound, Ezra. The ABC of Reading. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions n.d. - Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. and introd. T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber 1954 Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. London: Cambridge University Press 1936

236 Bibliography Rabelais, Francis. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans. J.M. Cohen. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin 1955 Reynolds, Mary. Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1981 Riquelme, John Paul. Teller and Tale in Joyce's Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1983 Robinson, Richard. The Buddhist Religion. Belmont, Calif.: Dickenson 1970 Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1989 Rose, Danis, and John O'Hanlon. Understanding 'Finnegans Wake.' New York: Garland Publishing 1982 Rose, Ellen Cronan. 'Dancing Daedalus: Another Source for Joyces Portrait of the Artist.' Modern Fiction Studies 28.4 (Winter 1982-3), 596-603 Russell, Bertrand. Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. 1919; rpt, London: George Allen and Unwin 1963 Sachs, Curt. World History of the Dance. Trans. Bessie Schonberg. New York: WW. Norton 1963 Seidel, Michael. Epic Geography: James Joyce's 'Ulysses.' Princeton: Princeton University Press 1976 Seldes, Gilbert. The Seven Lively Arts. 1924; rpt, New York: Sagamore Press 1957 Senn, Fritz. 'The Aliments ofjumeantry.' The James Joyce Newslitter 3.3 (1966) Simms, George Otto. Exploring the Book ofKells. Dublin: The O'Brien Press 1988 Skeat, Rev. Walter W. A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 1882; rev. ed., New York: Capricorn Books 1963 Solomon, Margaret C. Eternal Geomater: The Sexual Universe of'Finnegans Wake. 'Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press 1969 Stephenson, William. 'William James, Niels Bohr and Complementarity: II - Pragmatics of Thought.' Psychological Record 56 (1986), 529-43 Sullivan, Sir Edward. The Book ofKells. 5th ed. London: Studio Publications 1952 Sullivan, John WN. The Limitations of Science. New York: Viking 1933 Sullivan, Kevin. Joyce among the Jesuits. New York: Columbia University Press 1958 Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 1979 - To Brecht and Beyond: Soundings in Modern Dramaturgy. New York: Harvester / Barnes and Nobles 1984 Sweet, Henry. New English Grammar, Logical and Historical. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1891 Theall, Donald F. 'Beyond the Orality/Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the PreHistory of Cyberspace.' Postmodern Culture2.3 (May 1992) [an electronic journal], available at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.592/theall 592

Bibliography

237

- Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Seme in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995 - The Hieroglyphs of Engined Egypsians: Machines, Media and Modes of Communication in Finnegans Wake.' In Joyce Studies Annual 1991. Ed. Thomas F. Staley. Austin: University of Texas Press 1991. 129-52 - 'James Joyce: Literary Engineer.' In Literature and Ethics: Essays Presented to Professor A.E. Malloch. Ed. Gary Wihl and David Williams. Montreal: McGill-Queen s University Press 1988. 111-27

— The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror: Understanding McLuhan. Montreal: McGillQueen's University Press 1971 - 'Pope's Satiric Program: The War with the Dunces.' Report of ACUTE (I960), 11-16 - 'Sendence of Sundance: Sense, Communication and Community in Finnegans Wake.' Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 6.2 (June 1980), 2-13 - 'Sound, Sense and the Enveloping Facts: Inspecting the Wit's Waste of an Unheavenly Body.' English Studies in Canada 1.1 (Spring 1975), 97-110 Theall, Donald E, and Joan B. Theall. 'Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce: Beyond Media.' Canadian Journal of Communication 14.4/5 (Fall/Dec. 1989), 46-66 Tichi, Cecilia. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature and Culture in Modernist America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1987 Tindall, William York. A Reader's Guide to 'Finnegans Wake. 'New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1969 - A Reader's Guide to James Joyce. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Co. 1959 Valery, Paul. Aesthetics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Bollingen Series 45.13. New York: Pantheon Books 1964 - An Anthology. Ed. James R. Lawler. Bollingen Series 45.A. 1956; rpt, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1977 - The Art of Poetry. Trans. Denise Folliot. New York: Vintage 1961 Vico, Giambattista. The New Science of... Trans. T.G. Bergin and M.H. Fisch. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1948 Waddell, Helen, ed. Medieval Latin Lyrics. Rev. ed. New York: Henry Holt and Co. 1948 Weir, Lorraine. 'The Choreography of Gesture: Marcel Jousse and Finnegans Wake.' James Joyce Quarterly 14.3 (Spring 1977), 313-25 — Writing Joyce: A Semiotics of the Joyce System. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press 1989 Werner, Gosta. 'James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein.' Trans, from Swedish by Erik Gunnemaik. James Joyce Quarterly 27.3 (Spring 1990), 491-507 Williams, Aubrey. Pope's Dunciad. London: Methuen 1955 Wilson, Robert Anton. Coincidance: A Head Test. 1988; rpt, Santa Monica, Calif.: New Falcon Publications 1994

238 Bibliography Wordsworth, William. 'Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.' In The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. 1904; rpt, London: Oxford University Press 1951 Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1974 - Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. 1964; rpt, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul / University of Chicago Press 1982 - The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. 1979; rpt, London: ARK / Routledge and Kegan Paul 1985 - The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. 1972; rpt, London: ARK / Routledge and Kegan Paul 1986 Zaehner, R.C. Hinduism. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press 1966 Zimmer, Heinrich. Philosophies of India. Ed. Joseph Campbell. Cleveland: Meridian 1956

Index

Abbott, Edwin A.: Flatland, 131 advertising, 27-8, 144, 149 Aesop's fables: 'Ant and the Grasshopper,' 159; 'Fox and the Grapes,' 144 Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius, 24 Alan of Lille (Alanus de Insulis), 20, 189 allegory, xvi—xviii, xxi, 24, 27—8, 84, 116-19, 126-8, 132 ALP, xix, 9,19, 46-7, 50, 60-1, 64-5, 68, 75, 79, 92-3, 96, 112, 118, 122, 124,127,134, 137, 140,144-5,156, 172 Anna Livia Plurabelle, 47, 59, 61, 65, 84, 98, 113, 119, 122-3, 129, 135, 161, 165-6,169, 183 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 37, 142 Apuleius, Lucius, 18, 23 Arabian Nights, 121 Archdruid, 7, 14, 109-10, 122, 172-81 Archpoet: Confessio, 20 Aristotle, xxii, 8, 21, 79 Artaud, Antonin, 45 Ascher, Marcia and Robert, 189 avant-garde, xv, xviii, 4, 13, 15-17, 24, 26, 63,119, 128,142, 161, 172 Babbage, Charles, 131

Bacon, Sir Francis: De Sapientia Veterum (Wisdom of the ancients), 34 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 12, 23, 26, 28, 112; Rabelais and His World, 28 'Ballad of Persse O'Reilly,' 61 Barthes, Roland, 72 Bataille, Georges, xviii, 15,17, 63,75,112, 114, 116-17; The Accursed Share, xv, 114 Bateson, Gregory, xxi Baudelaire, Charles, 88 Bauhaus, 4, 186 Beckett, Samuel, 19, 20, 106, 118; 'Dante ... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce,' 20, 69, 89 Beckett, Samuel, et al.: Our Exagmination, 19-20,89, 118, 186 Bell, E.T., 131 Bellini, Vincenzo, 76 Benjamin, Walter, xviii, 6, 12, 13, 15, 18-19, 24, 26-8, 75, 82, 87, 116-18; 'On the Mimetic Faculty,' 75; OneWay Street, 6, 12-13; Origin of German Tragic Drama, 24; technological reproducibility, 6 Benstock, Bernard, 63 Bergson, Henri, 17, 40, 44, 125, 143-4, 193; virtual memory, 193

240 Index Berkeley, Bishop George, 166, 174, 176, 180—1; theory of colours, 14; theory of vision, 173 Beyond the Word, xxi Bezouts, Etienne, 115, 131 Bishop, John, 53, 78, 86, 115, 144, 192; Joyce's Book of the Dark, 14, 173 Blake, William: 'Exuberance is beauty,' 114 Bloom, Leopold, xx, 7, 10, 17, 27-8, 301, 34, 36, 38-9, 43-5, 47-8, 57, 92, 101, 105,133-4,161, 164,166 Boccioni, Umberto: Dynamism of a Cyclist, 4 Bohr, Niels, 12 BookofKells, 8, 56, 120, 128, 176, 178 Book of the Dead, 85 Borges, Jorge Luis, 185-6, 190 Boston Evening Transcript, 74 Boswell, James: Life of Johnson, 8 Brancusi, Constantin, 86 Brand, Stuart, 186; MIT's Media Lab, 186 Brecht, Bertolt, 18-19, 28, 73 bricolage, 11, 12 Bruno, Giordano, 19-20, 24, 96-7, 116, 118, 125 Buddhism, 170 Budgen, Frank, 14, 28, 34, 37-8, 44, 69, 74, 118, 133, 174 Bufiuel, Luis, 186 Burke, Edmund, xxi, 188, 191, 194

Cartesianism, 23, 24, 60, 160 Catholic liturgy, 170; triduum, 171 Celtic Twilight, 29 chaos theory, 157 chaosmos, 12, 33, 47, 62, 140, 150, 154, 157-8,167, 181,193 Chaplin, Charles, 38, 87, 143 Chaucer: Canterbury Tales, 79 church and state, 16 classical temper, 21 Cockcroft, Sir John Robert, 67 Cocteau, Jean, xv Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 70, 132; Biographia Literaria, 70 colour and light, xvi, 178, 180 comedy, 17, 18 comic epic, 28, 38 comic strips: Felix the Cat, 42; Mandrake the Magician, 42; MoonMullins, 165; Mutt and Jeff, 94, 99, 176; Olive Oyl, 165; Popeye and Olive Oyl, 122; Thimble Theater, 122,171; Winnie Carr, 165 complementarity, 12, 31, 62, 154-5, 158, 160, 169,177, 179, 181 contemporary city, 31 Crosby, Caresse, 10, 53 Crosby, Harry, 10 cultural colonization, 21 cultural production, 4, 5, 9,15,22, 32,44,

63-4, 66, 69, 71, 79-80, 82,143, Caffrey, Cissy, 17 Cage, John, 185-6 Cantor, Georg Waldermar, 130, 135, 138, 155 Carlyle, Thomas: Sartor Resartus, 8 carnivalesque, 15, 22, 26, 28-9, 112 Carpenter, Edmund, 191 Carroll, Lewis. See Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge

165-6, 184-5, 190, 194 Curie, Marie, 6 cyberculture, 188-9, 192, 195 cyberspace, 149, 185, 192, 195 Dada, 4, 51 Daedalus, 14, 34, 43, 84-5 dance, 4, 61, 71, 73, 75, 83-6, 89, 100, 140-1; troia, or maze dance, 84

Index Dante Alighieri, 18-21,24, 116, 118-19, 127-8; levels of meaning, xvii Darwin, Charles: The Descent of Man, 148; Origin of Species, 148 Dee, John, 24 Deleuze, Gilles, xix, 38, 45, 51, 104, 133, 147, 172; Logic of Sense, 133; Proust and Signs, 172 Derrida, Jacques, 147, 185-6, 194 Descartes, Rene, 131 Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich, 143 Dignam, Paddy, 27 Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (pseud. Lewis Carroll), 50-1, 66, 103-4, 132-3, 137, 159; Alice, 103; Alice books, 51, 104, 137; the real Alice, Alice Liddell, 103, 104, 137; Sylvie and Bruno, 66 Don Giovanni, 100 dream, 30 dreamspace, 143 dreamtime, 143 dream-work, 7, 161 Dryden, John, 24; 'Abaslom and Achitophel,' 23; 'A Discourse Concerning Satire,' 22; 'Macflecknoe,' 23; Varronian satire, 23 Duchamp, Marcel, xv, 9, 27, 51, 131, 186; A I'infinitif, 186; The Box of 1914, 186; The Green Box, 186; Large Glass, 186; The Large Glass or the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, 4 Duns Scotus, Joannes, 21, 177, 179 Duras, Marguerite, xv

Easter Vigil, 169-71, 174-5, 178 Eco, Umberto, 42, 86, 179, 185-6, 194 Eddas, 123

Eddington, Sir Arthur, 132,135,141,157; Expanding Universe, 113 Edison, Thomas, 6

241

Egyptian Book of Coming Forth by Day, 170 Egyptian Book of the Dead, 114, 123 Eiffel Tower, 6, 7 Einstein, Albert, 6, 143, 152, 177; Elektrodynamik beiuegter Korper, 37; theory of relativity, 40, 131, 144 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 191 Eisenstein, Sergei, 65, 184, 186 Eliot, T.S., 88 epiphany, 178-81 Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, 23 epyllia, 38, 118 Erasmus, Desiderius, xxii, 18, 21-3, 26, 115; Encomium Moriae, 21 etym, xxii, 67, 149, 153, 158-60, 181 Euclid, 139 everyday life, xvi, xxi, 4—5, 33, 37, 42,

49-50, 73, 82, 105-6, 110, 143, 166, 170 Fellini, Federico, xxi Ficino, Marsilius, 24 Finnegans Wake, xv-xxii, 3-8, 10-16, 18-24, 27-32, 34-5, 40, 42, 44-6, 48, 50-4, 56-66, 69-77, 79-91, 93-100, 103-4, 106-7, 109-11, 114-15, 117-20, 122, 124-36, 143-8, 151-2, 154-5, 159-71, 173-4, 176-82, 185, 187-92 Fletcher, Phineas: The Purple Island, xvii, 44, 118 Franklin, Benjamin, 8 Freeman's Journal, 35 Freeman's Press, 101 Freud, Sigmund, 29, 33, 48, 82, 93, 103-4,114-15,158,161,163,171, 180; Leonardo da Vinci, 5, 7 Frye, Northrop, 23 Futurism, 4, 9

242

Index

Gauss, Friedrich, 131, 135 Genet, Jean: Le Balcon, 7 geometry, xv, 33, 53, 130-9, 165; analytical, 135; Cartesian analytic, 130; Euclidean, 138; n-dimensional, 130; nonEuclidean, xxi, 130-1; non-Euclidean spherical, 135; Riemannian, xv; Riemann's n-dimensional, 131 gesture, xx, 36, 42-3, 54-6, 74-5, 80, 83-4, 87, 95-6, 162, 178, 186-9, 191-3; as the universal language, 42 Gibson, William, 185-6 Giedion, Sigfried, 3-4, 37, 98-9, 142, 184; The Eternal Present, 98; Mechanization Takes Command, 4, 37; Space, Time and Architecture, 37 Giedion-Welcker, Carola, xv, xviii, 4 Gilbert, Stuart, 33 Girault, Charles-Pierre: Grammaire des grammaires, 165 Glasheen, Adaline, 177 Godel, Kurt, 141; Godels theorem, 158 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: colour theory, 173 Goliardic poetry, 18 Goliardic poets, 20 Goody, Jack, 158 Gordon, John, 77 Gothic cathedrals, 18 Griffith, D.W.: The Birth of a Nation, 76 Groden, Michael, 31-2, 119 Guattari, Fe"lix, xix, 38, 45, 104 Gutenberg, Johannes, 162 Hamilton, Richard, 131 Havelock, Eric, 158 Hayman, David, xvii, 119, 122; 'Ulysses': The Mechanics of Meaning, 17 Hazlitt, William, 17 HCE, xix, xx, 5-10,13-14,19,25,27,35,

46, 50-3, 58-61,64,68,70,74-80,87, 89, 92, 98, 104, 106-7,112-13, 118, 121-2, 124,126-7, 129, 134-6, 145, 152, 156,161, 166, 172, 181, 190 Hegel, G.WE, 58, 70, 132 Heidegger, Martin, 24 Heisenberg, Werner, 12 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 14, 152, 180; Physiological Optics, 173; Popular Scientific Lectures, 173 Hemingway, Ernest, 143 Henry of Ghent, 117 Herr, Cheryl: Joyce's Anatomy of Culture, 38 Herring, Phillip, 31, 133 Hertz, Heinrich, 148 Hilbert, David, 131 Hollywood dream factory, 123, 148 Homer, 117; Odyssey, 118, 187 homofaber, 7, 8 Hubble, Edwin Powell, 157; theory of the expanding universe, 135 Huxley, Julian, 10 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 104 Innis, Harold A., 158, 187 Irish insurrection of 1916, 171 Issy, 121-2, 137 Izzy, 92, 93, 108-9, 118, 124, 140, 174 Jakobson, Roman: similarity and contiguity, 161 James, William, 160 Jolas, Eugene, 20, 69 Jones, Indigo, 85 Jonson, Ben(jamin), xxii, 18, 21, 50, 85-6, 95; Pleasure Reconcil'd to Virtue, 85 Jousse, Marcel, 54; La Manducation de la parole, 55 Joyce, Helen and Giorgio, 106 Joyce, James, xv, xviii, 6, 8, 12-13, 18-19,

Index 24, 26-8, 75, 81-2, 87, 117-18; Chamber Music, 167; 'TheDayofRabblement,' 153; Dubliners, 32; Exiles, xv; 7#? Holy Office, 19, 20, 25; James Joyce Archives, xxi; Letters, 161; poetic engineer, 10, 30; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 26, 31-3, 43, 80, 84, 118, 144; Scribbledehobble, 164; 5fc?/>^« /fcw, 13, 21, 37, 178-9; Tales of Shem and Shaun, 10; Work in Progress, xv, 5,10, 13, 19, 32-3, 40,42,51,69,89, 127, 143, 186 Joyce, John, 50 Joyce, Lucia, 104, 106 Joyce, Nora, 106 Joyce, Stanislaus, 105 Jung, Carl Gustav, 104, 163 Kafka, Franz, xviii Kant, Immanuel, 160 Kenner, Hugh, 143 Kern, Stephen: 'The Culture of Time and Space,' 142 Kevin, Saint, 35, 122, 166, 172-4, 177, 182 Keystone Cops, 143 Klee, Paul, xxi, 27, 120, 186 Krafrt-Ebbing, Richard von, 104 Kristeva, Julia, 23, 114 Kronecker, Leopold, 130 Kubrick, Stanley, xxi labyrinth, 84—6, 129; as a geometrical pattern, 84 Lacan, Jacques, 185-6 Larbaud, Valery, 69 laughter, 16-18, 22, 29 Lawrence O'Toole, Saint, 173, 182 Lefebvre, Henri, 32; 'la vie quotidienne,' 32 Le"ger, Fernand: Ballet mecanique, 9

243

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 131 Lem, Stanislaw, xxi Lenehan's riddle: The Rose of Castile, 101 Leon, Paul, 106 Leonardo da Vinci, 4-6, 21, 33 LeVi-Strauss, Claude, 12, 189 Lewis, P. Wyndham, 4, 17, 19, 40, 50-1, 66, 103, 132-3, 142-5, 148, 151, 153-5, 159, 184; The Apes of God, 76; Art of Being Ruled, 143; The Art of James Joyce,' 40; Blast, 4; Childermass, 76, 143; The Enemy, 143; Men without Art, 17; Time and Western Man, 143; The Wild Body, 17 light and colour, xvi, xx, 7, 77, 106, 110-11, 132, 155, 173, 175-8, 180 Linati, Carlo, 33, 34 Little Brown Jug, 100 Litz, Walton, 31 Loos, Anita: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 143 Lord, Jack, 158 Lovelace, Ada, Countess of, 131 Lowry, Malcolm, 9, 42 Lucian, 22 Lull, Ramon: Ars Magna, 131 Lumiere, Louis and Auguste, 6 machinic, the, xvii, xix, xx, xxii, 9,11, 16-17, 19, 32, 36,43-5,49-50, 53,60, 63,65,73,78,84,103, 111, 118-19, 123-4,132-4,137,155,158,159,183, 187-8 Makavejev, Dusan, xxi Mallarme, Stephane, 7, 86,164,190; Coup de dts, 31; Les Dieux antiques, 34 Marinetti, F.T.: Futurist Manifesto, 4 Marschak, Alexander, 189 Marx, Karl, 18,29, 158 McGreevy, Thomas, 106 McHugh, Roland, 118, 123, 130, 151;

244

Index

Annotations, 138; 'the sigla approach,' 118 McLuhan, H. Marshall, xxi, 7, 86, 143, 147, 149, 185, 187, 190-1, 193-4; The Gutenberg Galaxy, 185; The Mechanical Bride, 143; War and Peace in the Global Village, 193 memory, xvi, 13, 30, 41-5, 48, 51, 59, 61,

64,67-9,73-5,79,87,95-7,146,148, 183, 192-3 Menippean satire, xvii, 5, 18, 22—3, 27—9, 114 Mercanton, Jacques, 115, 161 metonymy, xviii, 117, 132, 176 mimesis, xvi, xvii, 7-9, 73, 75, 78-81, 86-7, 92-6 Minkowski, Herman, 142 Minsky, Marvin, 131 modernist art, xxi, 24 modernist movement, xv Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 65 Molly, 30, 46-8, 101, 134, 166, 169 montage, 147 Moore, Henry, 17 Moore, Thomas: 'Take Back the Virgin Page,' 138; 'What Life like That of the Bard Can Be,' 177 Morse code, 55-6, 155, 163 Mulligan, 43-4 Negroponte, Nicholas: Wired, 186 Newton, Issac, 23, 131, 144, 157, 160, 177; Principia, 18 Nicholas of Cusa, 19, 125; Dedocta ignorantia (On learned unknowing), 176 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 24, 29, 158, 184 Odyssey, 28

Ogden, C.K., 10; Basic English, 10

Ogden, C.K., and I.A. Richards: The Meaning of Meaning, 10, 93, 132 O'Hehir, Brendan, 175 One Thousand and One Nights, 123 Ong, Walter, 158, 187 optophone, 81 orality, 55; and literacy, xx, 158, 161, 187 ordo vagantes (wandering scholars), 20 Ovid, 118; Metamorphoses, 43 Panofsky, Erwin, 172 paramodern, the, xviii Parnell, Charles Stewart: and Kitty O'Shea, 92 Parry, Milman, 158 Pascal, Blaise, 21, 115, 131 Pascal's sphere, 189-90 Pater, Walter: The Renaissance, 5 Patrick, Saint, 7, 14, 87, 109-10, 122, 166, 172-81 Peano, Giusseppe, 130, 139-40 Perse, St John, 97 Petronius Arbiter, Gaius, 18, 23 photomontage, 13 Picabia, Francois: Machine Pournez Vite, 4 Picasso, Pablo, 17 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 24 Planck, Max, 152, 156-7; Planck's constant, 134 Poe, Edgar Allan, 86 poetic engineer, 10, 29-31, 62-3, 115 Poincare\ Henri, 130-1, 141 Polti, George: Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, 122 Pope, Alexander, xvii, 18,21,23-4, 50, 53, 60, 115, 119, 123; Art of 'Sinking in Poetry, 22; Dunciad, xvii, 21; Dunciad Variorum, 22 postmodernism, 3, 190, 195

Index Pound, Ezra, 83, 107 Powers, Arthur, 3, 8 probability theory, 158 quantum theory, xix, 131, 152, 154-6, 158, 169, 175,177, 181 Rabelais, Francois, xvii, xxii, 13, 18, 21, 23-4, 26, 29, 40, 50, 99, 165; Gargantua, 24, 99, 106 relativity theory, xix, 144, 152, 154-5, 157, 177 Rockefeller, Helen, 104 Romeo and Juliet, 121 Rose, Danis, 119, 172 Rose, Danis, and John O'Hanlon: Understanding Finnegans Wake, 65 Rubaiyat, 121 Russell, Bertrand, 132, 141; Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 47, 130-1, 141 Russell, George, 44 Rutherford, Lord Ernest, 67 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 33, 109 Sade, Marquis de, 29, 109 satire, xvi-xviii, xxi, xxii, 4, 16-24,

27-9, 77, 90, 107-8, 112-16, 119, 163, 189 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 12, 161 Schultz, Dutch, 35 Scotus Erigena, 21 Scriblerus Club, 22 Seidel, Michael, 34 Seldes, Gilbert, 3, 4; The Seven Lively Arts, 3 semiotics, 3, 71, 161, 186 Senn, Fritz, 131 Shakespeare, William, 66, 166 Shaun, 88, 93, 97, 108-9, 112, 118, 120,

124, 153, 155-6,166

245

Shaw, G.B., 147 Shem, 5,10,12, 14, 25-6, 40-2, 54, 56, 58, 65, 70, 84, 87-8, 93, 97, 100, 112, 114-15, 118-21, 124, 127, 129, 140, 146, 152-3, 161-2, 165-7, 175 sigla, xvii, xix, 76, 118, 134, 141 Smirching of Venus, 108 social science fiction, 168 Solomon, Margaret, 136 Sortes Virgilianae, 138 space-time, 4, 37, 42, 136, 142, 144-7, 149-50, 152, 154, 177 Spenser, Edmund, 119 Stein, Gertrude, 143 Stephen, 7, 13, 21, 31, 37-8, 42-8, 98, 101, 133-4, 142, 178-9 Sterne, Laurence, xvii, xxii, 18, 21, 23—4, 50, 127; Tristram Shandy, 22 Sullivan, J.W.N., 10, 132 surrealism, xviii, 13, 15, 27, 81, 161 surrealists, 13, 26, 128, 186 Suter, August, 11 Sweet, Henry: future perfect, 146 Swift, Jonathan, xvii; Battle of the Books, 22; Gulliver's Travels, 11, 18, 21; Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, 22-4, 50, 87, 119-20; Tale of a Tub, 8, 22 Sykes, Claude, 133 symbolistes, 3 tactility, 96-7, 110, 149, 182, 188 Taylor, Edward, 145 Taylor, Frederick Winslow: time-motion study, 145 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 20, 21, 177, 179 time and space, xvi, xix, xxi, 4, 20, 28, 34,

40,131-2, 137, 142, 144,146,148-9, 168, 192 Tosti, Francesco, 76

246 Index transition, 143 Turing machines, 131 TV, 66, 148, 150,165-6, 191; John Logic Baird, 67; Butt and Taff, 66, 98, 149, 166, 175 Ulysses, xv-xxi, 3, 5, 7, 9-12, 16-17, 21-2, 26-39, 41-8, 50-1, 57, 60-1, 69, 73, 82, 84-5, 87, 90, 95, 99-100, 104-6, 113, 117-18, 120, 128-30, 133-4, 142-4,151,158,161,164,167-9,178, 187, 192 Valery, Paul, 5, 83, 184 Varro, Marcus Terentius: Satirae Menippeae, 23 Varronian satire, 22—4 Vatican propaganda, 77; Church censorship, 77 Verdi, Giuseppe: Aida, 163 Vico, Giambatista, 5, 20, 24, 64, 69-71, 73,90,115-16,118-19,121,124,151, 186, 193-4; New Science, 24, 90, 128, 162, 184, 187, 190; theory of historical evolution, 54 virtual reality, 144, 185, 188, 190-1, 193 vivisection, 13, 16, 21, 33, 82, 178

Watson-Watt, Sir Robert: radar systems, 76 Watt, James, 37 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 5, 40 Weaver, Warren, 131 Weir, Lorraine, 115 Welles, Orson, 147 Wheatstone, Sir Charles, 81 Whitehead, Alfred, 143 Whitman, Walt, 8, 52, 113-14 Wiener, Norbert, 131 Wilde, Oscar, 79, 97; DeProfundis, 140 Wired, 6 Woolworth Building, 7 Wordsworth, William, xv Wright, Frank Lloyd, 124 Wright brothers (Orville and Wilbur), 6, 124 Yates, Frances, 24, 97, 192; The Art of Memory, 97; Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 97 Yeats, William Butler, 84, 151; 'The Second Coming,' 184; A Vision, 184 Young, Thomas, 173 zeroic couplet, 22, 53, 123, 138