BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY: JAMES JOYCE AND THE PRE-HISTORY OF CYBERSPACE

From pirmann@cs.rutgers.edu Sun Apr 18 23:05:42 1993
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 93 23:02:29 EDT
From: pirmann@cs.rutgers.edu (David Pirmann)
To: pirmann@cs.rutgers.edu
Subject: James Joyce and the Prehistory of Cyberspace

                BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY:
             JAMES JOYCE AND THE PRE-HISTORY OF CYBERSPACE

                                  by

                           DONALD F. THEALL
                         University Professor
                           Trent University
                          <dtheall@trentu.ca>

               _Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.3 (May, 1992)

          Copyright (c) 1992 by Donald F. Theall, all rights
          reserved.  This text may be freely shared among
          individuals, but it may not be republished in any
          medium without express written consent from the authors
          and advance notification of the editors.



[1]       _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 Marshall McLuhan's desire to
     write a book 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
     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 technoculture, just as the pervasive
     McLuhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an
     unconscious one, of our verbal heritage.
[2]       In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the
     emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the
     development of electromechanical communications, telematics
     and virtual reality.  Cyberspace, as Gibson saw 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.^1^
     This "consensual hallucination" produced by "data abstracted
     from the banks of every computer in the human system"
     creates an "unthinkable complexity.  Lines of light ranged
     in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of
     data.  Like city lights receding."^2^  Almost a decade
     earlier, McLuhan's remarks about computers (dating from the
     late 70s) display some striking similarities:^3^
          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 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
     Gibson's %iconics% and McLuhan's particular use of
     hieroglyph or iconology, like that of mosaic, primarily
     derives from Joyce and Giambattista Vico.
[3]       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^5^, for these researchers
     also conceive of a VR 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_^7^ and the serial publication of his accompanying
     notes from _The Box of 1914_ through _The Green Box_ to _A
     l'infinitif_.  His interest in the notes as part of the
     total work echo Joyce's 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 VR and MIT's Media Lab 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 60s and 70s 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^
[4]       Understanding the social and cultural implications of
     VR and cyberspace requires a radical reassessment of the
     inter-relationships 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 discussed: (i) the
     crucial nature of VR's challenge to the privileging of
     language through the orality/literacy dichotomization used
     by many theorists of language and communication; (ii) the
     idea of VR'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 CNS 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 CNS in communication is a key to Joyce's literary
     exploration of a theme he shared with his radical modernist
     colleagues in other arts who envisioned the eventual
     development of a coenaesthetic medium^9^ that would
     integrate and harmonize the effects of sensory and
     neurological information in currently existing and newly
     emerging art forms.
[5]       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.)  Imagine Joyce
     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?  What people
     once read, they will now go to see in film and on
     television; everyday life will appear in greater detail and
     more up-to-date fashion in the press, on radio and in
     television; oral poetry will be reanimated by the
     potentialities of sound recording.^10^
[6]       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,
     encyclopedic 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.^11^  The _Wake_ is the most
     comprehensive exploration, prior to the 1960s or 70s, 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 Vico's _New Science_^12^ as
     the structural scaffolding for the _Wake_--the equivalent of
     Homer's _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.
[7]       As the world awakens to the full potentialities for the
     construction of artifacts and processes of communication in
     the new electric cosmos, Joyce foresees the 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 toward the development
     of a theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium,
     "virtual reality."  Since the action takes place in a
     dreamworld, Joyce can produce an impressively prophetic
     imaginary prototype for the virtual worlds of the future.
     His dreamworld 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 multi-media forms and envisions how they
     will utilize his present, which will have become the past,
     to transform the future.^13^
[8]       The hero(ine)^14^ in the _Wake_, "Here Comes
     Everybody," is a communicating machine, "This harmonic
     condenser enginium (the Mole)" (310.1), an electric
     transmission-receiver system, an ear, the human sensorium, a
     presence "eclectrically filtered for all irish earths and
     ohmes."  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, focussed on questioning the place of
     oral and written language in an electro-mechanical
     technoculture that engenders more and more comprehensive
     modes of communication biased towards the dramatic, marks
     Joyce as a key figure in the pre-history of virtual reality.
[9]       Acutely sensitive to the inseparable involvement of
     speech, script, and print with the visual, the auditory, the
     kinesthetic and other modes of expression, Joyce roots all
     communication in gesture: "In the beginning was the gest he
     jousstly says" (468.5-6).  Here the originary nature of
     gesture (gest, F. %geste% = gesture)^15^ is linked with the
     mechanics of humor (i.e., jest) and to telling a tale
     (gest as a feat and a tale or romance).  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."  Since gestures,
     and ultimately all acts of communication, are generated from
     the body, the "gest" as "flesh without word" (468.5-6) is "a
     flash" that becomes word and "communicake[s] with the
     original sinse" [originary sense + the temporal, "since" +
     original sin (239.1)].  "Communicake" parallels eating to
     speaking, and speaking is linked in turn to the act of
     communion as participation in, and consumption of, the
     Word--an observation adumbrated in the title of one of
     Marcel Jousse's groundbreaking books on gesture as the
     origin of language, _La Manducation de la Parole_ ("The
     Mastication of the Word").  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.^16^  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*.^17^
[10]      The _Wake_ provides a self-reflexive explanation of the
     communicative process of encoding and decoding required to
     interpret an encoded text, which itself is
     characteristically mechanical:
          The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately
          is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the
          raiding there originally.  That's the point of
          eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in
          soandso many counterpoint words.  What can't be coded
          can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere
          grieved for.  Now, the doctrine obtains, we have
          occasioning cause causing effects and affects
          occasionally recausing altereffects.  Or 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.  (482.31-483.4)
     The dreamer as a poet, a Hermetic thief, an "outlex"
     (169.3)--i.e., an outlaw, lawless, beyond the word and,
     therefore, the law, "invents" the writing by originally
     discovering the reading of the book and does so by "raiding"
     [i.e., "plundering" (reading + raiding)].^18^  This reading
     encompasses both the idealistic "eschatology" and the
     excrementitious-materialistic (pun on scatology) within the
     designing of this "book of kills" (deaths, deletions,
     drinking sessions, flows of water--a counterpoint of
     continuity and discontinuity),^19^ a book as carefully
     crafted or machined as the illuminations of the _Book of
     Kells_ are.  Seeing and hearing are intricately involved in
     this process, so the reader of this night-book also becomes
     a "raider" of the original "reading-writing" through the
     machinery of writing.  It is a production "in soandso many
     counterpoint words" that can be read only through the
     machinery of decoding, for "What can't be coded can be
     decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for"
     (482.34).  The tale that the pen writes is transmitted by
     the post, and the whole process of communication and its
     interpretation is an extension of the hand and of bodily
     gesture-language: "The gist is the gist of Shaum but the
     hand is the hand of Sameas" (483.3-4).
[11]      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).^20^  The link is rhythm, for
     "Soonjemmijohns will cudgel 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 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 of which
     is "wordcraft": for example, hieroglyphs and primitive
     script based on drawings or mnemonic devices.^21^  Runes and
     ogham are literally "woodwordings," so pre- or proto-writing
     (i.e., syllabic writing) is already "a mechanization of the
     word," which is itself implicit in the body's use of
     gesture.
[12]      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 artifacts and
     events as well.^22^  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 artifacts, 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.^23^
     Adapting Vico's speculation that human communication begins
     with the gestures and material symbols of the "mute," Joyce
     early in the _Wake_ presents an encounter between two
     characters whose names deliberately echo Mutt and Jeff of
     comic strip fame.  Mutt (until recently a mute) and Jute (a
     nomadic invader) "excheck a few strong verbs weak oach
     eather" (16.8-9).
[13]      Beginning with gesture, hieroglyph and rune, Joyce
     traces human communication through its complex, labyrinthine
     development, right down to the TV and what it bodes for the
     future.  For example, an entire episode of the _Wake_
     (I,5)^24^ is devoted to the technology of manuscripts and
     the theory of their interpretation--textual hermeneutics--in
     which the _Wake_ as a book is interpreted as if it were a
     manuscript, "the proteiform graph is a polyhedron of all
     scripture" (107.8).  At each stage, Joyce recognizes how the
     machinery of codification is implicit in the history of
     communication, for discussing this manuscript, he observes
     that
          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 but not
          punctured (in the university sense of the term) by
          numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged
          instrument. . . .  (123.34-124.3)
     This illustrates how the beginning of electric media (the
     telegraph) is a transformation of the potentialities of the
     early manuscript, just as any manuscript is a transformation
     of the "wordcraft" of "woodwordings."  "Morse code" is
     indicative of the mechanics of codification, for while code
     is essential to all communication (thus prior to the moment
     when the mechanical is electrified), the role of
     codification is radically transformed by mechanization.
[14]      The appearance of the printing press demonstrates the
     effect of this radical transformation:
          Gutenmorg with his cromagnon 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)
     As "Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and
     great primer" steps "rubrickredd out of the wordpress," the
     dream reminds us that "papyr is meed of, made of, hides and
     hints and misses in prints."  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.  Implicit in the
     technology of print is the complex intertextuality of verbal
     ambivalence, for "every word will be bound over to carry
     three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book
     of Doublends Jined."  Printing sets in place the "root
     language" (424.17) residing in the types and topes of the
     world and potentially eliminates a multitude of alternate
     codes such as actual sounds, visual images, real objects,
     movements, and gestures that will re-emerge with the
     electromechanical march towards VR and cyberspace.
[15]      By the 1930s, in a pub scene in the _Wake_, Joyce
     playfully anticipated how central sporting events or
     political debates would be for television when he described
     the TV projection of a fight being viewed by the pub's
     "regulars" (possibly the first fictional TV bar room scene
     in literary history).  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 Taff's images on "the bairdboard bombardment
     screen" ("bairdboard" because John Logie Baird developed TV
     in 1925).  Joyce explains how "the bairdboard bombardment
     screen," the TV as receiver, receives the composite video
     signal "in scynopanc pulses" (the synchronization pulses
     that form part of the composite video signal), that come
     down the "photoslope" on the "carnier walve" (i.e., the
     carrier wave which carries the composite video signal) "with
     the bitts bugtwug their teffs."  Joyce imagines this
     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 at the time, Joyce is still able,
     on analogy with the telegraph, to think of the electrons or
     photons as bits of information creating the TV picture.
[16]      Speech, print and writing are interwoven with
     electromechanical technologies of communication throughout
     the _Wake_.  References to the manufacture of books,
     newspapers and other products of the printing press abound.
     Machineries and technological organizations accompany this
     development: reporters, editors, interviewers, newsboys, ad
     men who produce "Abortisements" (181.33).  Since complex
     communication technology is characteristic of the later
     stages, in addition to newspapers, radio, "dupenny"
     magazines, comics (contemporary cave drawing), there is "a
     phantom city phaked by philm pholk," by those who would
     "roll away the reel world."  Telecommunications materialize
     again and again throughout the night of the _Wake_, where
     "television kills telephony."
[17]      The "tele-" prefix, betraying an element of futurology
     in the dream, appears in well over a dozen words including
     in addition to the familiar forms terms such as "teleframe,"
     "telekinesis," "telesmell," "telesphorously," "televisible,"
     "televox," or "telewisher," while familiar forms also appear
     in a variety of transformed "messes of mottage," such as
     "velivision" and "dullaphone."  This complex verbal play all
     hinges on the inter-translatability of the emerging forms of
     technologically mediated communication.  In the opening
     episode of the second part, the "Feenicht's Playhouse," an
     imaginary play produced by HCE's children in their nursery
     is "wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in
     cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript.  In four
     tubbloids" (219.28-9).  Like the cinema, "wordloosed"
     (wirelessed but also let loose) transglobally, all such
     media are engaged in a "crowdblast" of existing languages
     and cultures, producing an interplay between local cultures
     and a pan-international hyperculture.
[18]      In the concluding moments of the _Wake_, Joyce
     generalizes his pre-cybernetic vision in one long intricate
     performance that not only concerns the book itself, but also
     anticipates by twenty years some major discussions of
     culture, communication, and technology.  A brief scene
     setting: this is the moment in the closing episode just as
     the HCE is awakening.  In the background he hears noises
     from the machines in the laundry next door.  It is breakfast
     time and there are sounds of food being prepared; eggs are
     being cooked and will be eaten, so there is anticipation of
     the process of digestion that is about to take place.^25^
     At this moment a key passage, inviting interminable
     interpretation, presents in very abstract language a
     generalized model of production and consumption, which is
     also the recorso of the schema of this nocturnal poem, that
     consumes and produces, just as the digestive system itself
     digests and produces new cells and excrement--how else could
     one be a poet of "litters" as well as letters and be
     "litterery" (114.17; 422.35) as well as literary?
[19]      The passage begins by speaking about "our wholemole
     millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational
     gazebocroticon," which may be the book, a letter to be
     written, the digestive system assimilating the eggs, the
     sexual process, the mechanical "mannormillor
     clipperclappers" (614.13) of the nearby Mannor Millor
     laundry, the temporal movement of history, or a theory of
     engineering, for essentially it relates the production of
     cultural artifacts or the consumption of matter (like
     reading a book, seeing a film or eating eggs; the text
     mentions a "farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as
     eggburst, eggblend, eggburial, and hatch-as-hatch-can"
     (614.28)).  The passage concludes, "as sure as herself
     pits hen to paper and there's scribings scrawled on eggs"
     (615.9-10).  Here the frequent pairing of speaking
     (writing) with eating is brought to a climax in which it is
     related to all the abstract machines which shape the life of
     nature, decomposing into "bits" and recombining.
[20]      These bits, described as "the dialytically [dialectic +
     dialysis] separated elements of precedent decomposition,"
     may be eggs, or other "homely codes" such as the
     "heroticisms, catastrophes and ec-centricities" (the stuff
     of history or the dreamers stuttering speech or his
     staggering movements) transmitted elementally, "type by
     tope, letter from litter, word at ward, sendence of sundance
     . . ." (614.33-615.2).  All of these bits--matter, eggs,
     words, TV signals, concepts, what you will--are
     "anastomosically assimilated and preteri-dentified
     paraidiotically," producing "the sameold gamebold adomic
     structure . . . as highly charged with electrons as
     hophazards can effective it" (615.5-8).  In anticipation of
     the contemporary electronic definition of the "bit," Joyce
     associates the structure of communication (ranging from TV
     and telegraphic signals to morphophonemic information and
     kinesthesia) with bits of signals, "data" and information.
     He presents it as essentially an assemblage of
     multiplicities, different from a synthesizing or totalizing
     moment, for it occurs by 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 "endspeaking nots for yestures" (267.8).
[21]      Here Joyce's entire prophetic, schizoid vision of
     cyberspace 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.  Joyce plays throughout the work 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 center is everywhere and
     circumference nowhere, since it is infinitesimal and
     undescribable (though apparently the paradigmic perimeter is
     sexual), as the paradisal mother communicates herself
     without apparent limit.  This is both an embodied and a
     disembodied sphere, polarizing and decentering 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 hero/ine 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 circumcentric megacycles"
     (310.7-8).  It can truly be said of HCE, "Ear! Ear! Weakear!
     An allness eversides!" (568.26),^26^ precisely because he is
     "%h%uman, %e%rring and %c%ondonable"(58.19), yet "humile,
     commune and ensectuous" (29.30), suffering many deprivations
     his "%h%ardest %c%rux %e%ver" (623.33) [italics mine].
     Though "humbly to fall and cheaply to rise, [this]
     exposition of failures" (589.17) living with "%H%einz %c%ans
     %e%verywhere"(581.5), still protests his fate "making use of
     sacrilegious languages to the defect that he would
     %c%hallenge their %h%emosphores to %e%xterminate them"
     (81.25) by decentering or dislocating any attempts to
     enclose him.
[22]      This discussion of sphere and 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 CNS--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."^27^  Today, VR, as
     Borges' 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 center.
     People englobed within virtual worlds find themselves
     interacting within complex, transverse, intertextual
     multimedia forms that are interlinked globally through
     complex, rhizomic (root-like) networks.
[23]      All of this must necessarily relate back to the way
     Joyce treats the subject of and produces the artifact that
     is *the book*.  While, beginning with Mallarme, the themes
     of the book and the death of literature resound through
     modernism, Joyce's transformation of the book filtered
     through the "mcluhanitic" 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 following Marcel Jousse and
     Vico,^28^ 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.
[24]      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 VR and TV.  At one point in the
     _Wake_ "Television kills telephony in brothers' broil.  Our
     eyes demand their turn.  Let them be seen!" (52.18-9), for
     TV also comprehends the visual and the kinesthetic.  Yet
     most McLuhanites who have opted for the orality/literacy
     split still call it an oral medium in opposition to print.
     The same problem occurs when mime, with its dependence on
     gesture and rhythm, is analyzed 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 seene.  The solence 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 dor 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.
[25]      Facile over-simplification also overlooks 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
     encyclopedic, multi-media 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.^29^  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 VR 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 VR.  When McLuhan
     and Edward 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 inter-sensory activity in
     communication, for "In the beginning there was the gest."
[26]      As Kenneth Burke realized in the 30s, Joyce's grounding
     communication and language in gesture is distinctly
     different from an approach which privileges language, for it
     involves a complete embodying of communication.  While the
     oral only embodies the speech organs, the entire CNS is
     necessarily involved in all communication, including speech.
     As John Bishop has shown in _Joyce's Book of the Dark_, the
     sleeper primarily receives sensations with his ear, but
     these are tranformed within the body into the world of signs
     that permeate the dream and which constitute the _Wake_.^30^
     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, he recognizes that a trend towards virtual
     reality 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.
[27]      As Joyce--who quipped that "some of the means I use are
     trivial--and some are quadrivial"^31^--was aware, ancient
     rhetorical theory (which he parodied both in the Aeolus
     episode of _Ulysses_ and in the "Triv and Quad" section (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 kinesthetic components.  Recent research into
     the classical and medieval "arts of memory," inspired by
     Frances Yates,^32^ have 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: "After sound,
     light and heat, memory, will and understanding.  Here (the
     memories framed from walls are minding) till wranglers for
     wringwrowdy wready are . . ." (266.18-22).  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.
[28]      Joyce was so intrigued by the potentials of the new
     culture of time and space for reconstructing and
     revolutionizing the book that 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."^33^  The mosaic of the _Wake_ contributes to
     understanding the nature of cyberspace by grasping the
     radical constitution of the electronic cosmos that Joyce
     called "the chaosmos of Alle" (118.21).  In this "chaosmos,"
     engineered by a sense of interactive mnemotechnics, he
     intuits the relation between a nearly infinite quantity of
     cultural information and the mechanical yet rhizomic
     organization of a network, "the matrix," which underlies the
     construction of imaginary and virtual worlds.  One 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).^34^  In counterpoint to the emerging
     technological capability to create the "virtual reality" of
     cyberspace, Joyce turned to dream and hallucination for the
     creation of virtual worlds within natural language.
[29]      That tactile, gestural-based dreamworld has built-in
     mnemonic systems:
          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 . . . .   (280.01-07)
     Joyce's virtual worlds began with the recognition of
     "everybody" as a poet (each person is co-producer; he quips,
     "his producers are they not his consumers?").  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:
          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.  (614.19-21)
     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.
[30]      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, 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
     communication^35^ (now talked about as virtual reality or
     cyberspace, though he never actually used that word).  The
     prime source of his "prophecies," which he never concealed,
     is to be found in Joyce and Vico.^36^  The entire Joycean
     dream is prophetic or divinatory in part, for the
     anticipated awakening (Vico's fourth age of ricorso
     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)
     Earlier, it is 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-R13).
[31]      Natural prophecy, the medieval way of thinking about
     futurology with which Joyce and McLuhan were naturally
     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, post-verbal, fully participatory and
     pan-sensory.^37^
[32]      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 complex
     socio-historical phenomenon, namely new modes of semiotic
     production.  Two brief examples: Hollywood "wordloosing
     celluloid soundscript over seven seas," or the products of
     the Hollywood dream factory itself as "a rolling away of the
     reel world," 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 "abortisements" (advertisements) 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.
[33]      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.^38^  Third, his work is itself
     the first "in-depth" contemporary exploration of the
     complexities of reading, writing, rewriting, speaking,
     aurality, and orality.  Fourth, developing Vico'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 semiotic ecology of communication,
     an ecology of sense, and making sense.  Fifth, in the
     creative project of this practice, 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.
[34]      VR or 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 decentering 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 would endow the paramedia
     that would eventually emerge.

     ------------------------------------------------------------

                                NOTES

          ^1^  William Gibson, _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ (NY: Bantam
     Paperback, 1989), 16.

          ^2^  William Gibson, _Neuromancer_ (NY: Ace, 1984), 51.

          ^3^  This quotation is taken from the posthumously
     published Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, _The Global
     Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st
     Century_, (NY: Oxford UP, 1989).  It was edited and
     rewritten from McLuhan's working notes, which had to date
     from the late 70s, since he died in 1981.  McLuhan's words
     were written more than a decade before their posthumous
     publication in 1989.

          ^4^  McLuhan (1989), 103.

          ^5^  Stuart Brand, _The Media Lab: Inventing the Future
     at MIT_ (NY: Viking, 1987).

          ^6^  Marshall McLuhan, _The Letters of Marshall
     McLuhan_, ed. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan and William
     Toye (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987), 385.

          ^7^  Craig E. Adcock, _Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the
     Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis_ (Ann Arbor,
     Michigan: UMI, 1983), 28: "The _Large Glass_ is an
     illuminated manuscript consisting of 476 documents; the
     illumination consists of almost every work that Duchamp
     did."

          ^8^  Stuart Brand (1987).

          ^9^  A further paper needs to be written on the way in
     which synaesthesia as well as coenesthesia participate in
     the pre-history of cyberspace.  The unfolding history of
     poets and artists confronting electromechanical
     technoculture, which begins in the 1850s, reveals a growing
     interest in synesthesia and coenesthesia 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 electro-communication when he established his
     concept of synaesthesia and the trend toward 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 all modes of expression
     to be transformed into minimal discrete contrastive units--
     bits.
          This assertion concerning Baudelaire's use of
     synesthesia is developed from Benjamin's discussions of
     Baudelaire.  The role of shock in Baudelaire's poetry, which
     links the "Correspondances" with "La Vie Anterieur," also
     reflects how the modern fragmentation involved in "Le
     Crepuscle du Soir" and "Le Crepuscle 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^  See D.F. Theall, "The Hieroglyphs of Engined
     Egypsians: Machines, Media and Modes of Communication in
     _Finnegans Wake_," _Joyce Studies Annual 1991_, ed. Thomas
     F. Staley (Austin: Texas UP, 1991), 129-52.  This
     publication provides major source material for the present
     article.

          ^11^  "Machinic" is used here very deliberately as
     distinct from mechanical.  See Gilles Deleuze, _Dialogues_,
     trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Haberjam (NY: Columbia UP,
     1987), 70-1, where he discusses the difference between the
     machine and the 'machinic' in contradistinction to the
     mechanical.

          ^12^  Giambattista Vico, _The New Science_,  ed.
     T.G. Bergen and M. Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1948).

          ^13^  For fuller discussion of Joyce and these themes
     see Donald Theall, "James Joyce: Literary Engineer," in
     _Literature and Ethics: Essays Presented to A.E. Malloch_,
     ed. Gary Wihl & David Williams (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP,
     1988), 111-27; Donald and Joan Theall, "James Joyce and
     Marshall McLuhan," _Canadian Journal of Communication_,
     14:4/5 (Fall 1989), 60-1; and Donald Theall (1991), 129-152.
     A number of subsequent passages are adapted with minor
     modifications from parts of the last article, which is a
     fairly comprehensive coverage of Joyce and technology.

          ^14^  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 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_ (NY:
     RKP, 1989).

          ^15^  "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_," _James Joyce Quarterly_, 14:3 (Spring 1977), 313-25.

          ^16^  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_, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed.
     Constantin V. Boundas (NY: Columbia UP, 1990).

          ^17^  See Dewey, _Art As Experience_ (NY: G.P. Putnam,
     1958) and Kenneth Burke, _Permanence and Change: An Anatomy
     of Purpose_ (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).

          ^18^  Cf. T.S. Eliot, _Selected Essays_ (NY: Harcourt,
     Brace, 1932), 182: "One of the surest of tests is the way in
     which a poet borrows.  Immature poets imitate; mature poets
     steal . . . "; see also "Old stone to new building, old
     timber to new fires," ("East Coker," _Four Quartets_, l. 5).
     Joyce's use of "outlex" relates to Jim the Penman, for Joyce
     analyzing Shem in the _Wake_ is aware of how the traditions
     of the artist as liar, counterfeiter, con man, and thief
     could all coalesce about the role of the artist as an
     outlaw.

          ^19^  "Kills" in the sense of "to kill a bottle";
     "kills" also as a stream or channel of water.

          ^20^  See Walter Ong's remarks about Marcel Jousse in
     _The Presence of the Word_ (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1967),
     146-7, and Lorraine Weir's more extensive development of the
     theme in (1977), 313-325, and in _Writing Joyce: A Semiotics
     of the Joyce System_ (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
     UP, 1989).

          ^21^  I.J. Gelb, _A Study of Writing_ (Chicago: U of
     Chicago P, 1963).

          ^22^  Cf. McLuhan (1989), 182.

          ^23^  Alexander Marschak, _The Roots of Civilization_
     (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1982); Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher,
     _Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, mathematics and
     Culture_ (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1981); Claude
     Levi-Strauss, _The Elementary Structures of Kinship_, trans.
     James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, ed. Rodney
     Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

          ^24^  The usual way to indicate sections of the _Wake_
     is by part and episode.  Hence I,v is Part I episode 5.
     There are four parts, the first consisting of eight
     episodes, the second and the third of four episodes each and
     the fourth of a single episode.

          ^25^  Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, _Understanding
     Finnegans Wake_ (NY: Garland Publishing, 1982), 308-09.

          ^26^  For detailed discussion of the treatment of the
     ear and hearing in _Finnegans Wake_, see John Bishop,
     _Joyce's book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake_ (Madison, WI: U
     of Wisconsin P, 1986), Chapter 9 "Earwickerwork," 264-304.

          ^27^  Jorge Luis Borges, _Other Inquisitions:
     1937-1952_, trans. Ruth R. Sims (NY: Simon and Schuster,
     1968), 6-9.

          ^28^  Lorraine Weir (1989).

          ^29^  Elizabeth Eisenstein, _The Printing Revolution in
     Early Modern Europe_ (NY: Cambridge UP, 1983).

          ^30^  Bishop (1986), 264-304.

          ^31^  Eugene Jolas, "My Friend James Joyce," in _James
     Joyce: two decades of criticism_, ed. Seon Givens (NY:
     Vanguard, 1948), 24.

          ^32^  E.g., in Frances Yates, _The Art of Memory_
     (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966).

          ^33^  James Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, _Letters_,
     ed. Stuart Gilbert (NY: Viking, 1957), 251 [Postcard, 16
     April 1927].

          ^34^  For a discussion of this see Gilles Deleuze,
     _Bergsonism_ (NY: Zone, 1988), Chapter 3, "Memory as Virtual
     Co-existence," 51-72.

          ^35^  Speaking of the all-embracing aspects of VR and
     cyberspace, the work which Baudrillard has made of
     "simulation" and "the ecstasy of communication" should be
     noted.  This issue is too complex to engage within an essay
     specifically focused on Joyce.  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.

          ^36^  This is a major theme of McLuhan and McLuhan's
     _The Laws of Media_ (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1988).

          ^37^  See Donald F. Theall, _The Medium is the Rear
     View Mirror; Understanding McLuhan_ (Montreal:
     McGill-Queen's UP, 1971).

          ^38^  John O'Neill credits Vico with a "wild sociology"
     in which the philologist is a wild sociologist in _Making
     Sense Together: An Introduction to Wild Sociology_ (NY:
     Harper & Row, 1974), 28-38.  The significance of Vico's
     emphasis on the body is developed in John O'Neill, _Five
     Bodies: The Human Sense of Society_ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,
     1985).