[00:00:00 - 00:00:13]	 Finnegan's Wake is the last and most ambitious and most puzzling work of the British writer
[00:00:13 - 00:00:18]	 James Joyce, who of course wrote Dubliners and Ulysses.
[00:00:18 - 00:00:25]	 And if Ulysses is the algebra of literature, then Finnegan's Wake is the partial differential
[00:00:25 - 00:00:27]	 equation.
[00:00:27 - 00:00:35]	 Most of us break down that algebra, few of us aspire to go on to the partial linear differential
[00:00:35 - 00:00:39]	 equation.
[00:00:39 - 00:00:45]	 In some ways, I think it can arguably be said that this is the quintessential work of art,
[00:00:45 - 00:00:55]	 or at least work of literature of the 20th century, and Joyce intended it that way.
[00:00:55 - 00:01:02]	 Joseph Campbell called it a staggering allegory of the fall and redemption of mankind.
[00:01:02 - 00:01:08]	 Equally respected critics have called it a surrender to the crossword puzzle portion
[00:01:08 - 00:01:10]	 of the human mind.
[00:01:10 - 00:01:16]	 So the main thing about it is that it is linguistically dense.
[00:01:16 - 00:01:18]	 It is dense on every level.
[00:01:18 - 00:01:24]	 It has over 63,000 individual words in it.
[00:01:24 - 00:01:30]	 It's long more words than most fictional manuscripts have words, period.
[00:01:30 - 00:01:36]	 It has over 5,000 characters in it.
[00:01:36 - 00:01:43]	 Ulysses was designed as a kind of, Joyce thought of it as his day book.
[00:01:43 - 00:01:51]	 It follows the peregrinations of an ordinary Dubliner, this is Ulysses, an ordinary Dubliner
[00:01:51 - 00:02:00]	 through the vicissitudes of his day, his struggles to buy some kidneys to fry for breakfast,
[00:02:00 - 00:02:09]	 his chance meeting with his wife's lover, so forth and so on.
[00:02:09 - 00:02:15]	 Fairly straightforward exposition of the techniques of literature that have been perfected in
[00:02:15 - 00:02:22]	 the 20th century, stream of consciousness, so forth and so on, slice of life.
[00:02:22 - 00:02:30]	 Finnegan's Wake was designed to be the night book to that day book.
[00:02:30 - 00:02:34]	 So it was conceived of as a dream.
[00:02:34 - 00:02:42]	 And one of the questions that undergraduates are asked to shed ink over is whose dream
[00:02:42 - 00:02:43]	 is it?
[00:02:43 - 00:02:46]	 And what is this book about?
[00:02:46 - 00:02:51]	 I mean, when you first pick it up, it's absolutely daunting.
[00:02:51 - 00:02:54]	 There doesn't seem to be a way into it.
[00:02:54 - 00:02:57]	 It seems to be barely in English.
[00:02:57 - 00:03:05]	 And the notion, you know, that one could by spending time with this tease out characters,
[00:03:05 - 00:03:14]	 plot, literary tension, resolution, this sort of thing seems fairly unlikely.
[00:03:14 - 00:03:21]	 Actually, it's one of the few things that really repays pouring effort into it.
[00:03:21 - 00:03:26]	 The first 25 pages are incredibly dense.
[00:03:26 - 00:03:31]	 And most people are eliminated somewhere in those first 25 pages.
[00:03:31 - 00:03:33]	 And so never really.
[00:03:33 - 00:03:38]	 It's a language, and you have to gain a facility with it.
[00:03:38 - 00:03:39]	 And you have to cheat.
[00:03:39 - 00:03:41]	 That's the other thing.
[00:03:41 - 00:03:49]	 And there's lots of help cheating because it has spawned a great exegetical literature,
[00:03:49 - 00:03:59]	 all kinds of pale scholars eager to give you the Celtic word lists of Finnegan's Wake or
[00:03:59 - 00:04:07]	 a discussion of the doctrine of the transubstantiation in Finnegan's Wake or so forth and so on.
[00:04:07 - 00:04:14]	 Hundreds of these kinds of doctoral theses in comp lit have been ground out over the
[00:04:14 - 00:04:18]	 decades.
[00:04:18 - 00:04:27]	 The reason I'm interested in it, I suppose I should fess up, is because it's two things
[00:04:27 - 00:04:30]	 clearly.
[00:04:30 - 00:04:38]	 Finnegan's Wake is psychedelic, and it is apocalyptic slash eschatological.
[00:04:38 - 00:04:45]	 And what I mean by those phrases is, first of all, what I mean by psychedelic is there
[00:04:45 - 00:04:50]	 is no stable point of view.
[00:04:50 - 00:04:54]	 There is no character per se.
[00:04:54 - 00:04:57]	 You never know who is speaking.
[00:04:57 - 00:05:05]	 You have to read into each speech to discover, you know, is this King Mark, Anne Olivia Pluribel,
[00:05:05 - 00:05:12]	 Humphrey Chimptonier, Wicker, Shem, the Penman, Sean, who is it?
[00:05:12 - 00:05:15]	 And identities are not fixed.
[00:05:15 - 00:05:20]	 Those of you who have followed my rap over the years, I'm always raving about how psychedelics
[00:05:20 - 00:05:22]	 dissolve boundaries.
[00:05:22 - 00:05:30]	 Well, Finnegan's Wake is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of
[00:05:30 - 00:05:34]	 human history and dissolved all the boundaries.
[00:05:34 - 00:05:40]	 So Queen Mob becomes Mae West.
[00:05:40 - 00:05:50]	 You know, all the personages of pop culture, politics, art, church history, Irish legend,
[00:05:50 - 00:05:59]	 Irish internecine politics are all swirling, changing, merging.
[00:05:59 - 00:06:01]	 Time is not linear.
[00:06:01 - 00:06:10]	 You will find yourself at a recent political rally, then return to the court of this or
[00:06:10 - 00:06:16]	 that Abyssinian emperor or pharaoh.
[00:06:16 - 00:06:18]	 It's like a trip.
[00:06:18 - 00:06:23]	 And the great technique, I was thinking about this as I was thinking about this lecture,
[00:06:23 - 00:06:28]	 the great technique of the 20th century is collage or pastiche.
[00:06:28 - 00:06:36]	 It was originally developed by the Dadaists in Zurich in 1919.
[00:06:36 - 00:06:43]	 Right now it's having a huge resurgence in the form of sampling in pop music.
[00:06:43 - 00:06:47]	 And Joyce was the supreme sampler.
[00:06:47 - 00:06:58]	 I mean, he draws his material from technical catalogs, menus, legal briefs, treaty language,
[00:06:58 - 00:07:04]	 mythologies, dreams, doctor-patient conversations.
[00:07:04 - 00:07:11]	 Everything is grist for this enormous distillery.
[00:07:11 - 00:07:15]	 And yet, you know, what comes out of this?
[00:07:15 - 00:07:25]	 Once you learn the codes and once you learn to play the game is a Joycean story that all
[00:07:25 - 00:07:28]	 graduates of Ulysses will recognize.
[00:07:28 - 00:07:37]	 I mean, the main, what Joyce was about was an incredible sympathy with common people
[00:07:37 - 00:07:48]	 and an awareness of the dilemma of, you know, being a Jew in Irish Ireland, being a devotee
[00:07:48 - 00:07:56]	 of scholasticism in the 20th century, of dislocation and disorientation, of being the cuckolded
[00:07:56 - 00:08:00]	 husband, of being the failed divinity student.
[00:08:00 - 00:08:06]	 All of these characters and themes are familiar.
[00:08:06 - 00:08:10]	 It's quite an amazing accomplishment.
[00:08:10 - 00:08:13]	 There's nothing else like it in literature.
[00:08:13 - 00:08:19]	 It had very little anticipation.
[00:08:19 - 00:08:25]	 The only real anticipator of Joyce in English, I think, is Thomas Nash, who most people have
[00:08:25 - 00:08:27]	 never heard of.
[00:08:27 - 00:08:33]	 Thomas Nash was a contemporary of Shakespeare and wrote a famous, I don't know what that
[00:08:33 - 00:08:45]	 means in such a context, but a novel called the, it was called The Wayfaring Traveler.
[00:08:45 - 00:08:55]	 Anyway, Nash had this megalomaniac richness of language, this attitude that it's better
[00:08:55 - 00:08:58]	 to put it in than take it out.
[00:08:58 - 00:09:00]	 And that's certainly what you get with Joyce.
[00:09:00 - 00:09:12]	 I mean, Joyce is so dense with technical terms, brand names, pop references, localisms.
[00:09:12 - 00:09:20]	 The way to conceive of Finnegan's Wake, really, is like a midden, a garbage dump.
[00:09:20 - 00:09:27]	 And there is, in fact, a garbage dump in the Wake that feels, that figures very prominently.
[00:09:27 - 00:09:34]	 And what you as the reader have to do is go in there with nutpick and toothbrush and essentially
[00:09:34 - 00:09:41]	 remove one level after another level after another level and sink down and down.
[00:09:41 - 00:09:48]	 And the theme is always the same, you know, the delivery of the word, the misinterpretation
[00:09:48 - 00:09:54]	 of the word and the redemption of the word at every level in all times and places.
[00:09:54 - 00:10:01]	 The reason I'm now gone some distance toward explaining why I think of it as psychedelic,
[00:10:01 - 00:10:09]	 the reason why I think of it as eschatological and apocalyptic is because he really, you
[00:10:09 - 00:10:11]	 know, it's hard to tell.
[00:10:11 - 00:10:18]	 We don't have James Joyce around to ask how much of this material he took seriously and
[00:10:18 - 00:10:21]	 how much of it was grist for his literary mill.
[00:10:21 - 00:10:27]	 But he was perfectly conversant with Renaissance theories of magic.
[00:10:27 - 00:10:37]	 The entire book is based on La scienza nuova of Giambattista Vico, who was a, I don't even
[00:10:37 - 00:10:42]	 know what you would call him, a Renaissance sociologist, basically, and systems theorist.
[00:10:42 - 00:10:52]	 And Joyce once in a famous interview said that if the whole universe were to be destroyed
[00:10:52 - 00:10:59]	 and only Finnegan's wake survive, that the goal had been that then the entire universe
[00:10:59 - 00:11:03]	 could be reconstructed out of this.
[00:11:03 - 00:11:12]	 Some of you who are students of Torah, this is a very Talmudic idea that somehow a book
[00:11:12 - 00:11:15]	 is the primary reality.
[00:11:15 - 00:11:24]	 You know, the idea of in Hasidism in some schools is that all of the future is already
[00:11:24 - 00:11:29]	 contained in the Torah.
[00:11:29 - 00:11:35]	 And then when you ask them, well, if it's contained there, then isn't it predestined?
[00:11:35 - 00:11:40]	 And the answer is no, because the letters are scrambled.
[00:11:40 - 00:11:46]	 And only the movement of the present moment through the text correctly unscrambles and
[00:11:46 - 00:11:48]	 arranges the letter.
[00:11:48 - 00:11:51]	 This is Joyce thinking for sure.
[00:11:51 - 00:11:59]	 And it's very close to a central theme in Joyce and a central theme in the Western religious
[00:11:59 - 00:12:07]	 tradition, which is the coming into being the manifestation of the word, the declension
[00:12:07 - 00:12:11]	 of the word into matter.
[00:12:11 - 00:12:20]	 And in a sense, what Joyce was trying to do was he was in that great tradition of literary
[00:12:20 - 00:12:32]	 alchemy that whose earlier practitioners were people like Robert Flood, Athanasius, Kircher,
[00:12:32 - 00:12:39]	 or Aseltus, these are not familiar names, but in the late flowering of alchemy, when
[00:12:39 - 00:12:46]	 the birth of modern science could already, the rosy glow could already be seen, the alchemists
[00:12:46 - 00:12:53]	 turned toward literary allegory in the 16th and early 17th century.
[00:12:53 - 00:12:56]	 Joyce is essentially in that tradition.
[00:12:56 - 00:13:06]	 I mean, this is an effort to condense the entire of experience, as Joyce says in The
[00:13:06 - 00:13:15]	 Wake, all space time in a nutshell is what we're searching for here.
[00:13:15 - 00:13:23]	 A kind of philosopher's stone of literary associations from which the entire universe
[00:13:23 - 00:13:27]	 can be made to blossom forth.
[00:13:27 - 00:13:38]	 And the way it's done is through pun and tricks of language and double and triple and quadruple
[00:13:38 - 00:13:41]	 entendre.
[00:13:41 - 00:13:44]	 No word is opaque.
[00:13:44 - 00:13:53]	 Every word is transparent and you see through it to older meanings, stranger associations.
[00:13:53 - 00:14:06]	 And as your mind tries to follow these associative trees of connection, you eventually, you get
[00:14:06 - 00:14:12]	 the feeling, which is the unique feeling that The Wake gives you, which is it's about as
[00:14:12 - 00:14:20]	 close to LSD on the page as you can get because you are simultaneously many points of view,
[00:14:20 - 00:14:30]	 simultaneously many dramatis loci, many places in the plot.
[00:14:30 - 00:14:35]	 And the whole thing is riddled with resonance.
[00:14:35 - 00:14:44]	 You know, a man doing a task on one level is on another level a Greek god completing
[00:14:44 - 00:14:52]	 a task and on another level some other figure of some more obscure mythology.
[00:14:52 - 00:14:58]	 So really one thing about Finnegan's Wake, it's like a dipstick for your own intelligence.
[00:14:58 - 00:15:03]	 What you bring to it is going to determine what you get out.
[00:15:03 - 00:15:11]	 And if you have read the books which Joyce was familiar with or if you have armed yourself
[00:15:11 - 00:15:19]	 with such simple things as a Fodor's Guide to Ireland or a good map of Ireland or a good
[00:15:19 - 00:15:28]	 work of Irish mythology, then it immediately begins to betray its secrets to you.
[00:15:28 - 00:15:33]	 And it's so rich that it's easy to make original discoveries.
[00:15:33 - 00:15:39]	 It's easy to see and understand things which probably have not been seen or understood
[00:15:39 - 00:15:48]	 since James Joyce put it there because he had this kind of all-inclusive intelligence.
[00:15:48 - 00:15:56]	 Maybe I didn't make clear enough why that to my mind is an eschatological phenomenon,
[00:15:56 - 00:15:59]	 this production of the Philosopher's Stone.
[00:15:59 - 00:16:04]	 It's because it's about the union of spirit and matter.
[00:16:04 - 00:16:06]	 That's what the Philosopher's Stone is about.
[00:16:06 - 00:16:12]	 And writing a book which aspires to be the seed for a living world is about the union
[00:16:12 - 00:16:15]	 of spirit and matter as well.
[00:16:15 - 00:16:27]	 And the Christian scenario of redemption at the end of profane history is another scenario
[00:16:27 - 00:16:32]	 of transubstantial union, union of spirit and matter.
[00:16:32 - 00:16:41]	 This seems to be, in fact, the overarching theme of Fitting His Wake and of the 20th
[00:16:41 - 00:16:42]	 century.
[00:16:42 - 00:16:50]	 In terms of the temporal context for this book, it was finished in 1939, a few months
[00:16:50 - 00:16:55]	 before 1939, and Joyce died early in '39.
[00:16:55 - 00:17:02]	 In a sense, he died in one of the most science fiction moments of the 20th century because
[00:17:02 - 00:17:05]	 the Third Reich was going strong.
[00:17:05 - 00:17:11]	 It had not yet been pegged down a notch.
[00:17:11 - 00:17:20]	 Schemes of eugenics and thousand-year racially purified super civilizations, all of that
[00:17:20 - 00:17:27]	 crazy early '40s stuff was happening.
[00:17:27 - 00:17:32]	 And the book is surprisingly modern.
[00:17:32 - 00:17:37]	 Television appears, psychedelic drugs appear, all of these things appear.
[00:17:37 - 00:17:41]	 I mean, presciently, he was some kind of a prophet.
[00:17:41 - 00:17:48]	 And also, he understood the 20th century sufficiently that the part he hadn't yet lived through
[00:17:48 - 00:17:52]	 was as transparent to him as the part that he had.
[00:17:52 - 00:17:56]	 He could see what was coming.
[00:17:56 - 00:18:01]	 Well, that's by way of my introduction.
[00:18:01 - 00:18:09]	 I want to read you what some other people have said about this because I don't think
[00:18:09 - 00:18:12]	 I can say enough on my own.
[00:18:12 - 00:18:19]	 This is the indispensable book, if you're serious about this, The Skeleton Key to Finnegan's
[00:18:19 - 00:18:20]	 Wake.
[00:18:20 - 00:18:25]	 And it takes the view that we don't know what this thing is.
[00:18:25 - 00:18:29]	 So we have to go through it literally, line by line.
[00:18:29 - 00:18:37]	 And he tells you the story, the entire story in the one-page version, in the 10-page version,
[00:18:37 - 00:18:39]	 and in the 200-page version.
[00:18:39 - 00:18:46]	 And even in the 200-page version, there are sections where Campbell simply reports, "The
[00:18:46 - 00:18:51]	 next five pages are extremely obscure.
[00:18:51 - 00:18:53]	 Mark it."
[00:18:53 - 00:18:56]	 But this is just a short section.
[00:18:56 - 00:19:02]	 And one of the things about working with the Wake is you become, at first, this language,
[00:19:02 - 00:19:08]	 which is so impenetrable and bizarre, it ends up infecting you.
[00:19:08 - 00:19:13]	 And you become unable to write or talk any other way.
[00:19:13 - 00:19:17]	 So I'll read you some of Campbell's introduction.
[00:19:17 - 00:19:27]	 I think you will see it's like the Wake itself, except in baby steps.
[00:19:27 - 00:19:30]	 Introduction to a Strange Subject.
[00:19:30 - 00:19:36]	 Running riddle and fluid answer, Finnegan's Wake is a mighty allegory of the fall and
[00:19:36 - 00:19:38]	 resurrection of mankind.
[00:19:38 - 00:19:45]	 It is a strange book, a compound of fable, symphony, and nightmare, a monstrous enigma
[00:19:45 - 00:19:50]	 beckoning imperiously from the shadowy pits of sleep.
[00:19:50 - 00:19:55]	 Its mechanics resemble those of a dream, a dream which has freed the author from the
[00:19:55 - 00:20:01]	 necessities of common logic and has enabled him to compress all periods of history, all
[00:20:01 - 00:20:08]	 phases of individual and racial development, into a circular design of which every part
[00:20:08 - 00:20:11]	 is beginning, middle, and end.
[00:20:11 - 00:20:19]	 In a gigantic, wheeling rebus, dim effigies rumble past, disappear into foggy horizons,
[00:20:19 - 00:20:25]	 and are replaced by other images, vague but half-consciously familiar.
[00:20:25 - 00:20:31]	 On this revolving stage, mythological heroes and events of remotest antiquity occupy the
[00:20:31 - 00:20:38]	 same spatial and temporal planes as modern personages and contemporary happenings.
[00:20:38 - 00:20:41]	 All time occurs simultaneously.
[00:20:41 - 00:20:47]	 Tristram and the Duke of Wellington, Father Adam and Humpty Dumpty, merge in a single
[00:20:47 - 00:20:49]	 precept.
[00:20:49 - 00:20:52]	 Multiple meanings are present in every line.
[00:20:52 - 00:20:59]	 Interlocking allusions to key words and phrases are woven like fugal themes into the pattern
[00:20:59 - 00:21:00]	 of the work.
[00:21:00 - 00:21:07]	 Finnegan's Wake is a prodigious, multifaceted monolith, not only the cashemar of a Dublin
[00:21:07 - 00:21:13]	 citizen, but the dreamlike saga of guilt-stained, evolving humanity.
[00:21:13 - 00:21:18]	 The vast scope and intricate structure of Finnegan's Wake give the book a forbidding
[00:21:18 - 00:21:21]	 aspect of impenetrability.
[00:21:21 - 00:21:28]	 It appears to be a dense and baffling jungle, trackless and overgrown with wanton perversities
[00:21:28 - 00:21:30]	 of form and language.
[00:21:30 - 00:21:34]	 Clearly, such a book is not meant to be idly fingered.
[00:21:34 - 00:21:40]	 It tasks the imagination, exacts discipline and tenacity from those who would march with
[00:21:40 - 00:21:41]	 it.
[00:21:41 - 00:21:46]	 Yet some of the difficulties disappear as soon as the well-disposed reader picks up
[00:21:46 - 00:21:50]	 a few compass clues and gets his bearings.
[00:21:50 - 00:21:56]	 Then the enormous map of Finnegan's Wake begins slowly to unfold.
[00:21:56 - 00:22:03]	 Characters and motifs emerge, themes become recognizable, and Joyce's vocabulary falls
[00:22:03 - 00:22:07]	 more and more familiarly on the accustomed ear.
[00:22:07 - 00:22:14]	 Complete understanding is not to be snatched at greedily in one sitting, or in fifty, I
[00:22:14 - 00:22:16]	 might add.
[00:22:16 - 00:22:21]	 Nevertheless, the ultimate state of the intelligent reader is certainly not bewilderment.
[00:22:21 - 00:22:28]	 Rather, it is an admiration for the unifying insight, economy of means, and more than Rabalaisian
[00:22:28 - 00:22:33]	 humor, which have miraculously quickened the stupendous mass of material.
[00:22:33 - 00:22:39]	 One acknowledges at last that James Joyce's overwhelming micro-macrocosm could not have
[00:22:39 - 00:22:47]	 been fired to life in any sorcerer furnace less black, less heavy, less murky than this,
[00:22:47 - 00:22:50]	 his incredible book.
[00:22:50 - 00:22:56]	 He had to smelt the modern dictionary back to protean plasma and reenact the genesis
[00:22:56 - 00:23:01]	 and mutation of language in order to deliver his message.
[00:23:01 - 00:23:09]	 But the final wonder is that such a message could be delivered at all.
[00:23:09 - 00:23:13]	 Every book has to be about something.
[00:23:13 - 00:23:16]	 So what is this book about?
[00:23:16 - 00:23:29]	 Well, as far as anybody can tell, it appears to be about someone named, well they have
[00:23:29 - 00:23:37]	 hundreds of names actually, but for economy's sake, someone named Humphrey Chimpton Earwicker,
[00:23:37 - 00:23:41]	 or abbreviated HCE.
[00:23:41 - 00:23:53]	 And Humphrey Earwicker runs a pub in Chappalazzo, which is a suburb or a district of London.
[00:23:53 - 00:24:01]	 And he has, as it says, an Idle Wifey, who is Anna-Livia Pluribel.
[00:24:01 - 00:24:08]	 And now these two people, this barkeep and his wife, and their two children, Jerry and
[00:24:08 - 00:24:16]	 Kevin, or Shem and Sean, and then they also have hundreds of names because they occur
[00:24:16 - 00:24:19]	 on hundreds and hundreds of levels.
[00:24:19 - 00:24:26]	 Every brother's struggle in history is enacted by the two boys, Jerry and Kevin.
[00:24:26 - 00:24:33]	 They are Shem the penman and Sean the other one.
[00:24:33 - 00:24:39]	 And they dichotomize certain parts of the process.
[00:24:39 - 00:24:44]	 So here is, in one paragraph, this is the Cliff Notes version of what Finnegan's Wake
[00:24:44 - 00:24:46]	 is all about.
[00:24:46 - 00:24:57]	 If you commit this to memory, you will never be caught wanting at a New York cocktail party.
[00:24:57 - 00:25:04]	 As the tale unfolds, we discover that Humphrey Chimpton Earwicker is a citizen of Dublin,
[00:25:04 - 00:25:09]	 a stuttering tavern keeper with a bull-like hump on the back of his neck.
[00:25:09 - 00:25:17]	 He imagines, he emerges, sorry, as a well-defined and sympathetic character, the sorely harrowed
[00:25:17 - 00:25:23]	 victim of a relentless fate, which is stronger than, yet identical with, himself.
[00:25:23 - 00:25:29]	 Joyce refers to him under various names, such as "Here comes everybody" and "Haveth
[00:25:29 - 00:25:31]	 Childers everywhere."
[00:25:31 - 00:25:38]	 Indications of his universality and his role as the great progenitor, the hero has wandered
[00:25:38 - 00:25:45]	 vastly, leaving families, that is deposits of civilization, at every pause along the
[00:25:45 - 00:25:51]	 way from Troy and Asia Minor, he is frequently called the Turk, up through the turbulent
[00:25:51 - 00:25:57]	 lands of the Goths, the Franks, the Norsemen, and overseas to the green isles of Britain
[00:25:57 - 00:25:58]	 and the Irish.
[00:25:58 - 00:26:06]	 His chief Germanic manifestations are Woden and Thor, his chief Celtic, Manannan Maclur.
[00:26:06 - 00:26:13]	 Again, he is Saint Patrick carrying the new faith, again, Strongbow leading the Anglo-Norman
[00:26:13 - 00:26:18]	 conquest, again, Cromwell conquering with a bloody hand.
[00:26:18 - 00:26:26]	 Most specifically, he is our Anglican tavern keeper, HCE, in the Dublin suburb, Chapellezade.
[00:26:26 - 00:26:36]	 So like Ulysses, the ground zero here is the utterly mundane, you know, middle class, tormented
[00:26:36 - 00:26:42]	 Irish people embedded in the detritus of the 20th century.
[00:26:42 - 00:26:52]	 But there's an effort to never lose the cosmic perspective, never lose the sense that we
[00:26:52 - 00:26:59]	 are, you know, not individuals lost in time, but the front ends of gene streams that reach
[00:26:59 - 00:27:08]	 back to Africa, that we somehow have all these ancestors and conflicts swarming and storming
[00:27:08 - 00:27:09]	 within it.
[00:27:09 - 00:27:23]	 It's a glorious, psychedelic, heartful Irish view of what it is to be embedded in the mystery
[00:27:23 - 00:27:24]	 of existence.
[00:27:24 - 00:27:28]	 Well, okay, enough arm waving.
[00:27:28 - 00:27:32]	 Now let's cut the cake here.
[00:27:32 - 00:27:40]	 Ever run past Eves and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious
[00:27:40 - 00:27:45]	 vicus of recirculation back to Howarth Castle and environs.
[00:27:45 - 00:27:52]	 Sir Tristram, the Allor de Amorzra or the Short Sea, had passing corps re-arrived from
[00:27:52 - 00:28:00]	 North Amorica, on this side the scraggie isthmus of Europe Minor, to welter fight his penicillate
[00:28:00 - 00:28:08]	 war, nor had top sawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselves to Lawrence
[00:28:08 - 00:28:16]	 County Gorgios while they went Dublin their mummer all the time, nor a voice from a fire
[00:28:16 - 00:28:22]	 bellowed Misha, Misha, to Tart Toph, Tart Patric.
[00:28:22 - 00:28:28]	 Not yet, though then a soon after, had a kid scab but ended a bland old Isaac.
[00:28:28 - 00:28:35]	 Not yet, though all's fair in vanacy, were Sothi Sester's wrath with two-in-one Nathan
[00:28:35 - 00:28:36]	 Joe.
[00:28:36 - 00:28:46]	 Rot a peck of Paws malt had gem or shen brewed by arc light, and roary end to the Reganbow
[00:28:46 - 00:28:50]	 was to be seen ringsome on the aqua face.
[00:28:50 - 00:29:10]	 The fall, (chanting)
[00:29:10 - 00:29:17]	 of a once wall straight old par, is retailed early in bed and later on life do it down through
[00:29:17 - 00:29:25]	 all Christian minstrelsy, the great fall of off wall entailed at such short notice the
[00:29:25 - 00:29:33]	 fit shoot of Finnegan, earth's solid man, that the Humpty Hill head of himself promptly
[00:29:33 - 00:29:40]	 sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his Tumpty tum-toes, and their upturned
[00:29:40 - 00:29:47]	 pike, toe and place is at the knockout in the park where oranges have been laid to rust
[00:29:47 - 00:29:52]	 upon the green since Devlin's first loved Livy.
[00:29:52 - 00:30:01]	 So now granted that the first pages are dense and it isn't all this dense because even though
[00:30:01 - 00:30:09]	 the concept of fractals lay years in the future, the effort here is to tell the whole damn
[00:30:09 - 00:30:17]	 thing in the first word, to tell it again in the next two words, to tell it again in
[00:30:17 - 00:30:20]	 the next three words and so on.
[00:30:20 - 00:30:29]	 So here in these first roughly three paragraphs a huge amount of information is being passed
[00:30:29 - 00:30:31]	 along.
[00:30:31 - 00:30:37]	 First of all, we're given a location if we're smart enough to know it.
[00:30:37 - 00:30:45]	 River run past even Adams from swerve of shore to bend of bay brings us by a commodious vicus
[00:30:45 - 00:30:51]	 of recirculation back to Howarth Castle and Envyron.
[00:30:51 - 00:30:59]	 Well now if you know the geography of Dublin you know that's where you are because and
[00:30:59 - 00:31:06]	 notice Howarth Castle and Envyron is H C E.
[00:31:06 - 00:31:15]	 These initials recur thousands of times in this book always bringing you back to remind
[00:31:15 - 00:31:18]	 you that this has something to do with Humphrey or Wicker.
[00:31:18 - 00:31:24]	 What this first sentence says is river run and it's the river Livy which we will meet
[00:31:24 - 00:31:30]	 in a thousand reincarnations because Anna Livy a plural bell is the personification
[00:31:30 - 00:31:33]	 of the goddess river.
[00:31:33 - 00:31:39]	 The river runs past even Adams and there is a church there on the shore named Adam and
[00:31:39 - 00:31:45]	 Eve in Dublin from swerve of shore to bend of bay and then this strange phrase brings
[00:31:45 - 00:31:51]	 us by a commodious vicus of recirculation.
[00:31:51 - 00:31:58]	 This announces the great architectonic plan of the wake that it is in fact going to be
[00:31:58 - 00:32:08]	 based on the sociological ruminations of Giambattista Vico's La sciencia nuova, the vicus mode of
[00:32:08 - 00:32:15]	 recirculation because as I'm sure you all know Vico's theory of the fall and redemption
[00:32:15 - 00:32:19]	 of mankind was that there were four ages.
[00:32:19 - 00:32:28]	 I can't remember gold, silver, iron, clay I think and so this idea of the recirculation
[00:32:28 - 00:32:37]	 of the connectedness of the cyclicity of the as he says the same again, again and again,
[00:32:37 - 00:32:41]	 again again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again,
[00:32:41 - 00:32:47]	 and this is one of his great, great themes is the recurso.
[00:32:47 - 00:32:54]	 Everything comes again, nothing is unannounced, every love affair, every dynastic intrigue,
[00:32:54 - 00:33:02]	 every minor political disgrace and a minor political disgrace figures very prominently
[00:33:02 - 00:33:11]	 in this book because as the carrier of Adam's sin, the great dilemma for Humphrey Earwicker
[00:33:11 - 00:33:23]	 is that he is running for a minor political post, alderman, but apparently one night rather
[00:33:23 - 00:33:26]	 juiced he relieved himself.
[00:33:26 - 00:33:32]	 Well there are many versions and you hear them all and they are all given in dreams
[00:33:32 - 00:33:36]	 and in mock trials and in accusatory fantasy.
[00:33:36 - 00:33:46]	 He either innocently took a leak in the park or he fondled himself in some way in the presence
[00:33:46 - 00:33:54]	 of Maggie and her sister in such a way that his reputation is now at great risk and it
[00:33:54 - 00:34:03]	 all depends on the testimony of a cad, a soldier or perhaps three soldiers, it's never clear,
[00:34:03 - 00:34:12]	 it's constantly shifting and this question of what happened when Maggie Seenall with
[00:34:12 - 00:34:20]	 her sister in shawl at the magazine wall haunts the book because on it turns the question
[00:34:20 - 00:34:28]	 of whether HCE is a stalwart pillar of the community or in fact a backsliding masturbator
[00:34:28 - 00:34:36]	 and a monster and so forth and so on as one always is if one is trapped in a James Joyce
[00:34:36 - 00:34:39]	 novel.
[00:34:39 - 00:34:46]	 Then this puzzling list in the second paragraph is simply a list of things which haven't happened
[00:34:46 - 00:34:47]	 yet.
[00:34:47 - 00:34:55]	 Sir Tristram, lover of music via Lord Amours, for o'er the short sea, had passing core,
[00:34:55 - 00:35:03]	 not yet, re-arrived from North Amorica from the coast of Brittany, on this side the scraggy-ism
[00:35:03 - 00:35:08]	 of Europe minor, to welter-weight his penicillate war.
[00:35:08 - 00:35:18]	 Now this word penicillate is typical Joyce punning peninsulate war obviously because
[00:35:18 - 00:35:24]	 it's being launched from Brittany, penicillate war because Sir Tristram is the great archetype
[00:35:24 - 00:35:31]	 of the lover and so his war is penicillate.
[00:35:31 - 00:35:36]	 Okay so that's the first thing that has not yet happened it's telling you.
[00:35:36 - 00:35:45]	 Sir Tristram has not yet come to Ireland to put it simply nor has Top Sawyer's rocks by
[00:35:45 - 00:35:52]	 the stream Oconee exaggerated the cells to Lawrence County Gorgios while they went Dublin
[00:35:52 - 00:35:55]	 their mummer all the time.
[00:35:55 - 00:35:59]	 Now this is further obscurity.
[00:35:59 - 00:36:11]	 There is a stream in Georgia and Top Sawyer is a reference to Tom Sawyer because Tom Sawyer
[00:36:11 - 00:36:17]	 was Huck Finn's friend and Huck Finn is Finn in America.
[00:36:17 - 00:36:22]	 There is a huge amount of Mark Twain that has been poured into these books because of
[00:36:22 - 00:36:33]	 the Huckleberry Finn connection, Finn in the new world and Top Sawyer's rocks is a reference
[00:36:33 - 00:36:37]	 possibly to testicles and so forth and so on.
[00:36:37 - 00:36:42]	 Every single word I mean you can just take a word and go into this and until you exhaust
[00:36:42 - 00:36:50]	 yourself and then the next thing that has not yet happened nor a voice from a fire bellowed
[00:36:50 - 00:36:55]	 Misha Misha to Tartoff Thou Art Petric.
[00:36:55 - 00:37:00]	 Tartoff is Celtic for Thou Art Baptised.
[00:37:00 - 00:37:05]	 So Saint Patrick has not yet baptised in Ireland.
[00:37:05 - 00:37:14]	 Not yet though Venison after and the Venison is a pun on venison and very soon had a kid
[00:37:14 - 00:37:17]	 scad butt ended a bland old Isaac.
[00:37:17 - 00:37:20]	 There's a reference to the Isaac Esau tale in the Bible.
[00:37:20 - 00:37:33]	 It's also a reference to Isaac Butts who was a figure in the politics of the Irish Rebellion.
[00:37:33 - 00:37:42]	 Not yet those all spares in vanity were Sothey Fester's Roth with Tua Nathan Joe.
[00:37:42 - 00:37:49]	 It's at this point a very obscure reference but there is a great incest and sister theme
[00:37:49 - 00:38:01]	 in Finnegan's wake and the twin the mistresses of Jonathan Swift become carriers of a huge
[00:38:01 - 00:38:09]	 amount of energy in here as do the mistresses of Thomas Stern because it's better to be
[00:38:09 - 00:38:16]	 swift than stirring or something like that.
[00:38:16 - 00:38:19]	 And then the last of these things which hadn't happened yet.
[00:38:19 - 00:38:27]	 Rata Peck of Paul's malt had gem or sham brewed by Arclight and Rory into the Regan bro was
[00:38:27 - 00:38:31]	 to be seen ringsome on the aqua face.
[00:38:31 - 00:38:35]	 That seems pretty obscure to me according to Joseph Campbell it's simply a reference
[00:38:35 - 00:38:45]	 to the presence of God moving over the waters in the first lines of Genesis ringsome on
[00:38:45 - 00:38:46]	 the aqua face.
[00:38:46 - 00:38:57]	 Then this phrase the fall and the multi syllabic word Baba Labara gave you that word.
[00:38:57 - 00:39:05]	 These are the viconian funders and they announce the beginning of each viconian age.
[00:39:05 - 00:39:15]	 And when the thunder speaks you know then that you're into a transition.
[00:39:15 - 00:39:22]	 Then it actually launches in the last paragraph into a fairly straightforward evocation of
[00:39:22 - 00:39:28]	 at least the mythological Finnegan.
[00:39:28 - 00:39:33]	 As you all probably know there is an Irish drinking ballad of great antiquity called
[00:39:33 - 00:39:37]	 the ballad of Tim Finnegan or the ballad of Finnegan's wake.
[00:39:37 - 00:39:46]	 And it tells the story of Tim Finnegan who was a hod carrier a bricklayers assistant
[00:39:46 - 00:39:55]	 and he was given to hitting the poteen rather hard and he fell from his ladder.
[00:39:55 - 00:39:57]	 It's the Humpty Dumpty story.
[00:39:57 - 00:40:05]	 He fell from his ladder and he broke his back and his friends waked him in the grand Irish
[00:40:05 - 00:40:11]	 fashion and at the height of the wake they became so carried away and intoxicated that
[00:40:11 - 00:40:23]	 they upended a bucket of Guinness over his head and he revived and joined the dance.
[00:40:23 - 00:40:30]	 Tim Finnegan looting walking straight a gentleman mighty a pretty beautiful brogue so rich and
[00:40:30 - 00:40:34]	 sweet to rise in the world he carried a hat you see the sort of a tippling way with a
[00:40:34 - 00:40:38]	 look of the knicker for Tim was born to help a man with his work each day to drop with
[00:40:38 - 00:40:39]	 a crater every morning.
[00:40:39 - 00:40:44]	 I told the man how dense to your father was the flow of your trotter's shake wasn't it
[00:40:44 - 00:40:47]	 the truth they told you less a fun that Finnegan swiped.
[00:40:47 - 00:40:52]	 One morning Tim got rather full his head fell heavy which made him shake fell from a ladder
[00:40:52 - 00:40:56]	 and he broke his skull and they carried him home as corpse to wake rolled him up in an
[00:40:56 - 00:41:00]	 ice-cream sheet and laid him out upon the bed they gave him a whisky at his feet and a bottle
[00:41:00 - 00:41:01]	 of pork or at his head.
[00:41:01 - 00:41:06]	 I told the man how dense to your father was the flow of your trotter's shake wasn't it
[00:41:06 - 00:41:09]	 the truth they told you less a fun that Finnegan swiped.
[00:41:09 - 00:41:14]	 His friends assembled at the wake and Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch first she brought
[00:41:14 - 00:41:17]	 him tea and cake then pipes the back and whisky punch.
[00:41:17 - 00:41:22]	 Then he overrided began to cry said to nice clean corpse did you ever see Tim awoke and
[00:41:22 - 00:41:23]	 why did you die?
[00:41:23 - 00:41:26]	 I heard a howl your god said "Petty McGee" I went from the Dano dense to your mother
[00:41:26 - 00:41:31]	 wealth to flow your trotter's shake wasn't it the truth they told you less a fun that
[00:41:31 - 00:41:32]	 Finnegan swiped.
[00:41:32 - 00:41:37]	 Then McGee O'Connor took up the job of finishes ye a wronging sure but he gave her the belt
[00:41:37 - 00:41:39]	 and the gob and left her sprawling on the floor.
[00:41:39 - 00:41:45]	 Then the warden soon engaged one to a woman a man to man she'll haily law was all the
[00:41:45 - 00:41:48]	 rage on her row and her auction soon began to whack.
[00:41:48 - 00:41:52]	 Mother Dano dense to your father wealth to flow your trotter's shake wasn't it the truth
[00:41:52 - 00:41:54]	 they told you less a fun that Finnegan swiped.
[00:41:54 - 00:41:59]	 Then McGee Maloney raised his head when a noggin of whisky blew at him it missed him
[00:41:59 - 00:42:05]	 falling on the bed the liquor scattered over Tim Tim revived see how he rises Timothy rising
[00:42:05 - 00:42:09]	 from the bed said "Well you're a whisky and I'm like Blaises, Stanimondale do you think
[00:42:09 - 00:42:10]	 I'm dead?"
[00:42:10 - 00:42:14]	 Whack Mother Dano dense to your father wealth to flow your trotter's shake wasn't it the
[00:42:14 - 00:42:17]	 truth they told you less a fun that Finnegan swiped.
[00:42:17 - 00:42:19]	 But this is the resurrection.
[00:42:19 - 00:42:26]	 I mean Tim Finnegan is very clearly for Joyce a Christ figure and here is then the first
[00:42:26 - 00:42:30]	 evocation of Tim Finnegan.
[00:42:30 - 00:42:37]	 The fall then the Viconian thunder of a once wall straight old par which is just an old
[00:42:37 - 00:42:44]	 person is retailed early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy.
[00:42:44 - 00:42:52]	 The great fall of the off wall entailed at such short notice the Ftchute of Finnegan.
[00:42:52 - 00:43:08]	 Now this word P-F-T-J-S-C-H-U-T-E-Ftchute is Norwegian I'm informed and refers to the act
[00:43:08 - 00:43:13]	 of falling and the act of falling from a hill.
[00:43:13 - 00:43:21]	 Finnegan, earth's solid man that the Humpty Hill head of himself promptly sends an unquiring
[00:43:21 - 00:43:27]	 one well to the west in quest of his Tumpty tum-toes and their upturned pike point and
[00:43:27 - 00:43:33]	 place is at the knockout in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green
[00:43:33 - 00:43:37]	 since Devlin's first love Lizzie.
[00:43:37 - 00:43:42]	 This is fairly transparent if you're Irish or a citizen of Dublin because what it's
[00:43:42 - 00:43:52]	 talking about is Dublin is imagined to be situated basically in the belly of an enormous
[00:43:52 - 00:43:58]	 giant person who is Finnegan.
[00:43:58 - 00:44:07]	 Finnegan lies like a giant reclining figure along the Liffey there, husband and wife,
[00:44:07 - 00:44:14]	 river and mountain and this is actually then the focus has changed and now we're talking
[00:44:14 - 00:44:18]	 about the geography.
[00:44:18 - 00:44:26]	 He was a solid man, earth's solid man, but then somehow he turned into something where
[00:44:26 - 00:44:33]	 the Humpty Hill head of himself promptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest
[00:44:33 - 00:44:40]	 of his Tumpty tum-toes and if you have a map of Dublin laid out you can actually see this
[00:44:40 - 00:44:48]	 enormous man in the landscape and there are many enormous men and women in the landscape
[00:44:48 - 00:44:55]	 of this planet and Joyce maps the Dublin geography over all of them.
[00:44:55 - 00:45:00]	 Some of you may know Istaxi Vatil, the magical mountain in Mexico.
[00:45:00 - 00:45:09]	 Istaxi Vatil means the sleeping woman in Toltec and many mountains are imagined to be sleeping
[00:45:09 - 00:45:10]	 people.
[00:45:10 - 00:45:17]	 So here he introduces this theme and this is one paragraph.
[00:45:17 - 00:45:27]	 This is the invocation of Finnegan as hod carrier.
[00:45:27 - 00:45:34]	 "Big Mr. Finnegan of the stuttering hand, Freeman's Mower, lived in the broadest way
[00:45:34 - 00:45:41]	 marginable in his rush lit too far back for messages before Joshua and Judges had given
[00:45:41 - 00:45:46]	 us numbers or Helviticus commuted Diteronomie.
[00:45:46 - 00:45:53]	 One yeasty day he sternly strucks his teat in a toe before to wash the future of his
[00:45:53 - 00:46:00]	 fates but ere he swiftly took it out again by the might of Moses the very water was evapourated
[00:46:00 - 00:46:04]	 and all the goodnesses had met their exodus."
[00:46:04 - 00:46:08]	 So that ought to show you what a pension Junshi Chappie was.
[00:46:08 - 00:46:17]	 "And during mighty odd years this man of hod cement and edifices, HCE hod cement and edifices,
[00:46:17 - 00:46:25]	 in toppers' thorpe piled buildung supra buildung upon the banks of the livers by the so and
[00:46:25 - 00:46:26]	 so.
[00:46:26 - 00:46:35]	 He iade iddle fifey aney, ogd the little creature, with her harring horns took up your part in
[00:46:35 - 00:46:42]	 her, off while babulous mirror ahead with goodly trowel and grasp and ivorold overalls
[00:46:42 - 00:46:53]	 which he ha' particularly fancied, like Harum Childeric Egberth he would calculate by multiplicables
[00:46:53 - 00:47:01]	 the altitude and multitude until he seesaw by neat light of the liquor where Twint was
[00:47:01 - 00:47:11]	 born his round head stable of other days to rise in undress masonry upstand'd, joy granite
[00:47:11 - 00:47:21]	 a wall worth of a skere scrape of most eyeful howeth entirely, originating from next to
[00:47:21 - 00:47:30]	 nothing and celestating the hymnals and all higher architect tipoflopical with a burning
[00:47:30 - 00:47:38]	 bush a bob off its bubble top and with larenzl toolers clittering up and tomazabuckets clattering
[00:47:38 - 00:47:39]	 down."
[00:47:39 - 00:47:48]	 Now, what this paragraph says is he was a great builder and I think if you think back
[00:47:48 - 00:47:52]	 through your impression of hearing it read, you knew that.
[00:47:52 - 00:48:02]	 You know, these words that are associated, words like a wall worth of a skere scrape
[00:48:02 - 00:48:06]	 of most eyeful howeth entirely.
[00:48:06 - 00:48:14]	 These are skyscraper words, wall worth, skere scrape, entirely, howeth, so forth and so
[00:48:14 - 00:48:16]	 on and he can do this.
[00:48:16 - 00:48:23]	 He can build up a pastiche of surfaces of impressions.
[00:48:23 - 00:48:27]	 Now, you might say why is there no economy?
[00:48:27 - 00:48:36]	 Well, there is no economy because economy is an aesthetic criterion for shoemakers,
[00:48:36 - 00:48:46]	 not for artists and, you know, economy is the curse of the Bauhaus babblers from hell
[00:48:46 - 00:48:51]	 which Joyce was very concerned to refute all of that.
[00:48:51 - 00:49:00]	 If you have to place this in a context, it's in the context of the most hallucinatory of
[00:49:00 - 00:49:01]	 the Baroque.
[00:49:01 - 00:49:04]	 You know, this is Arcamboldo land.
[00:49:04 - 00:49:10]	 This is a work that would have been welcome at the Rudolphine court in Prague.
[00:49:10 - 00:49:23]	 It's a work of magical complexity and enfolded self-reference.
[00:49:23 - 00:49:27]	 Now, we've just been through these first four paragraphs.
[00:49:27 - 00:49:34]	 Now, I'll read you what Joseph Campbell has to say on it, by no means all of what he has
[00:49:34 - 00:49:37]	 to say on it.
[00:49:37 - 00:49:42]	 The first four paragraphs are the suspended tick of time between a cycle just passed and
[00:49:42 - 00:49:44]	 one about to begin.
[00:49:44 - 00:49:49]	 They are in effect an overture resonant with all the themes of Finnegan's wake.
[00:49:49 - 00:49:56]	 The dominant motif is the polylingual thunderclap of paragraph three, "Baba, baba, darawom, that
[00:49:56 - 00:50:02]	 one," which the voice of God makes audible through the noise of Finnegan's fall.
[00:50:02 - 00:50:09]	 Narrative movement begins with the life, fall, and wake of Hod Carrier Finnegan, pages four
[00:50:09 - 00:50:10]	 to seven.
[00:50:10 - 00:50:15]	 The wake scene fades into the landscape of Dublin and environs.
[00:50:15 - 00:50:19]	 We've just heard how he fell from the ladder.
[00:50:19 - 00:50:29]	 Now, we move into a description of the wake, and there's a certain voice that appears at
[00:50:29 - 00:50:31]	 certain times.
[00:50:31 - 00:50:39]	 It's where there are a lot of words ending in A-T-I-O-N, continuation of the celebration
[00:50:39 - 00:50:42]	 until the examination of the extermination.
[00:50:42 - 00:50:45]	 Okay, these are the 12 judges.
[00:50:45 - 00:50:51]	 Each character, when they appear, has a certain tempo to their character.
[00:50:51 - 00:50:57]	 So when that tempo enters the text, you know the character is present, even though there
[00:50:57 - 00:51:00]	 may be no trace.
[00:51:00 - 00:51:06]	 For example, An Olivia Pluribel's tempo is the tempo of the hen.
[00:51:06 - 00:51:09]	 Hear a little, there a little, go a little, see a little, do a little.
[00:51:09 - 00:51:11]	 The hen is scratching.
[00:51:11 - 00:51:16]	 This is this nervous, bird-like, that's An Olivia's signature.
[00:51:16 - 00:51:23]	 Here's just one paragraph from the wake scene, which builds and has quite a minor amount of
[00:51:23 - 00:51:27]	 humor associated with it.
[00:51:27 - 00:51:39]	 She's, I should she, makul makul or hoia didi didi, of a trying Thursday morning, sobs they
[00:51:39 - 00:51:46]	 sided at Filigun's chrismorous wake, all the hooligans of the nation prostrated in their
[00:51:46 - 00:51:54]	 consternation, and their do-dismally ploflusive plethora of eulogization.
[00:51:54 - 00:52:00]	 There was plums and grooms and cheriffs and sithers and raiders and cinnamon too, and
[00:52:00 - 00:52:05]	 they all goined in with the shoutmost chauviality.
[00:52:05 - 00:52:12]	 Agog and ma-gog and the round of the ma-grog, to the continuation of that celebration in
[00:52:12 - 00:52:16]	 Tolhandan Hungan's extermination.
[00:52:16 - 00:52:23]	 Some in kink and chorus, more can-can keenan, belling him up and filling him down.
[00:52:23 - 00:52:27]	 He's stiff, but he's steady, is Priamolam.
[00:52:27 - 00:52:34]	 Twas he was a decent gay laborer and youth, sharpen his pillow-scone, top up his beer.
[00:52:34 - 00:52:39]	 Ere whar in this whar-el will ye hear such a din-nigan?
[00:52:39 - 00:52:47]	 With their deep brow fund-igs and the dusty fidelios, they laid him brawn-drawn a lang-last
[00:52:47 - 00:52:54]	 bed, with a buckle it's a-fisky for his feet and a barrel-load of gun-na-sore his head.
[00:52:54 - 00:53:00]	 See the total of the fluid hang the twaddle of the fuddle-doh.
[00:53:00 - 00:53:07]	 Well, it's a drunken Irish wish, that seems clear, but there are a lot of things going on.
[00:53:07 - 00:53:12]	 Ere whar in this whar-el will ye hear such a din-nigan?
[00:53:12 - 00:53:16]	 And he's stiff, but he's steady, is Priamolam.
[00:53:16 - 00:53:28]	 All this, all this Dionysian and sexual imagery is fully explicit.
[00:53:28 - 00:53:36]	 In some ways, more realized as a character, or more lovable, if that's the word, is Ann Olivia Pluribel.
[00:53:36 - 00:53:42]	 I mean, Ann Olivia Pluribel is Molly Bloom on acid, basically.
[00:53:42 - 00:53:47]	 I mean, Molly Bloom, we don't lose her outlines.
[00:53:47 - 00:53:56]	 We understand Molly, and because Molly doesn't offer us that much of her own mind,
[00:53:56 - 00:54:03]	 she stands for the eternal feminine, but only in the final soliloquy in Ulysses do we really contact her.
[00:54:03 - 00:54:05]	 Ann Olivia, it's her book.
[00:54:05 - 00:54:13]	 It may in fact be her dream, and the whole thing is permeated with her tensions and her cares.
[00:54:13 - 00:54:20]	 As it says, "Gran Pappas is fallen down," meaning the great father God is at wake.
[00:54:20 - 00:54:29]	 "Gran Pappas is fallen down, but Grinny sprids the board," meaning Ann Olivia is always there.
[00:54:29 - 00:54:31]	 She's always there.
[00:54:31 - 00:54:42]	 And in the wake, really you could almost say that Molly Bloom's soliloquy has been expanded to 300, 400 pages.
[00:54:42 - 00:54:47]	 And the whole thing is a meditation on the river.
[00:54:47 - 00:54:54]	 The river is the feminine, and the first image in the book and the last image are the image of the river.
[00:54:54 - 00:54:59]	 The river dissolves everything and carries it out to sea.
[00:54:59 - 00:55:05]	 Let me read this description of Ann Olivia Pluribel, and then we'll go back to the synopsis.
[00:55:05 - 00:55:16]	 "How bootiful and how true to wife of her, when strongly forbidden to steal our historic presence from the past,
[00:55:16 - 00:55:26]	 post-prophotheticals, so as to will make us all lordiers and ladymaidesses of a pretty nice kettle of fruit.
[00:55:26 - 00:55:33]	 She is living in our midst of debt and laughing through all plores for us.
[00:55:33 - 00:55:42]	 Her birth is uncontrollable, with a naparron for her mask and her sabos kicking arias, so ser, so solly.
[00:55:42 - 00:55:52]	 If you ask me and I sack you, how, how, Greeks may rise and Trojcers fall, she is mercenary.
[00:55:52 - 00:56:03]	 Through the length of the land lies under liquidation, flut, and there's nare a harbow nor an eye-brush on this glabrous place of her-shruft.
[00:56:03 - 00:56:11]	 What are vultures? She'll loan a vest and hire some peat and sarch the shores her cockles to heat,
[00:56:11 - 00:56:20]	 and she'll do all a tarf woman can to puff the business on. Puff. To puff the blaziness on. Puff, puff.
[00:56:20 - 00:56:32]	 And even if Humphrey shall fall frumpy times as awkward again in the beards bussaloom of all our grand remonstrances,
[00:56:32 - 00:56:39]	 there'll be eggs for the breakers come to mourn him, sunny side up with care.
[00:56:39 - 00:56:47]	 So true it is that there's where's a turnover the tay is wet too, and when you think you catch sight of a hind,
[00:56:47 - 00:56:51]	 make sure you're cocked by a hen.
[00:56:51 - 00:56:57]	 Well, Nora felt that Jimmy would have been much better as a singer.
[00:56:57 - 00:57:06]	 She so stated that she had great hopes for his voice, and she was a very practical woman, Nora Barnacle.
[00:57:06 - 00:57:10]	 There wasn't a literary bone in her body, I think.
[00:57:10 - 00:57:17]	 I think that's what Joyce loved about her, was that she was the real thing.
[00:57:17 - 00:57:26]	 And all these women, Molly and Olivia, they all are Nora Joyce for sure.
[00:57:26 - 00:57:38]	 He died shortly after it was published, although it had been known in manuscript for over ten years to the literati of his circle.
[00:57:38 - 00:57:47]	 It was called "Work in Progress," and people didn't even know if he was serious or not.
[00:57:47 - 00:57:50]	 And it was very hard to find a publisher.
[00:57:50 - 00:57:53]	 It was a typographical nightmare.
[00:57:53 - 00:58:00]	 Joyce was going blind, and so, you know, trying to keep track of the spelling,
[00:58:00 - 00:58:03]	 and there's hardly a standard spelling in there.
[00:58:03 - 00:58:11]	 There's hardly a word that is not somehow fiddled with and changed around.
[00:58:11 - 00:58:16]	 If you pay attention to what you're calling life as it is,
[00:58:16 - 00:58:23]	 you will discover that it's not a simple thing at all, that it's like this.
[00:58:23 - 00:58:31]	 I mean, I used to say, when you're vacuuming your apartment, Rome falls nine times an hour,
[00:58:31 - 00:58:34]	 and your job is to notice.
[00:58:34 - 00:58:39]	 And you always do notice, but you never tell yourself that you're noticing.
[00:58:39 - 00:58:53]	 So, in the course of a day, you know, I live, and you live, to some degree, the entirety of global civilization.
[00:58:53 - 00:59:01]	 I mean, Rome falls, algebra is discovered, the Turks are beating at the gates of Vienna,
[00:59:01 - 00:59:05]	 and it isn't even 11 a.m. yet, you know.
[00:59:05 - 00:59:12]	 So, there is this sense of the co-presence of history.
[00:59:12 - 00:59:20]	 We are imprisoned inside the linear assumption that I'm a person in a place, in a time, I'm alive.
[00:59:20 - 00:59:28]	 Most people aren't, but in fact, when you deconstruct all that, that's just, that is fiction.
[00:59:28 - 00:59:38]	 And the truth is more this onrushing magma of literary association,
[00:59:38 - 00:59:43]	 and you know, in Ulysses, you get an enormous amount of half-baked science.
[00:59:43 - 00:59:50]	 Leopold Bloom is always looking at things and explaining to himself how they work,
[00:59:50 - 00:59:57]	 using very crackpotted notions of hydraulics and electricity, and this sort of thing.
[00:59:57 - 01:00:06]	 I think, you know, people say the psychedelic experience is hard to remember, dreams are hard to remember,
[01:00:06 - 01:00:13]	 but harder to remember than either of those is simply ordinary experience.
[01:00:13 - 01:00:21]	 You know, you lie in the baths, and you close your eyes for 30 seconds, and empires fall,
[01:00:21 - 01:00:30]	 dynastic families unfold themselves, power changes hands, princes are beheaded, a pope disgraced, so forth.
[01:00:30 - 01:00:40]	 Oh, that was for you. And then somebody drops something, and you wake up, and 15 seconds have passed.
[01:00:40 - 01:00:47]	 That's the reality of life, but we suppress this chaotic, irrational side.
[01:00:47 - 01:00:53]	 The genius of Joyce and, to some degree, although in a more controlled form, Proust,
[01:00:53 - 01:01:00]	 and then there were other practitioners, Faulkner certainly, was what they called stream of consciousness.
[01:01:00 - 01:01:14]	 But what it was, was it was an ability to actually listen to the associating mind without trimming, pruning, judging, denying.
[01:01:14 - 01:01:21]	 One of the great puzzles to me is the great antagonism between Jung and Joyce,
[01:01:21 - 01:01:33]	 because you would have thought that they would have been comrades in arms, but Joyce loathed psychoanalysis.
[01:01:33 - 01:01:44]	 He didn't, he thought that to use all this material to elucidate imagined pathologies was a very uncreative use of it,
[01:01:44 - 01:01:49]	 and that it should all be fabricated into literature.
[01:01:49 - 01:02:02]	 It's very hard to surpass, you know, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, these people, they, everybody genuflects to Joyce,
[01:02:02 - 01:02:06]	 but very few people plow in the way he did.
[01:02:06 - 01:02:12]	 I mean, Thomas Pynchon is considered a difficult, hallucinatory writer,
[01:02:12 - 01:02:21]	 and there isn't 20 pages in Gravity's Rainbow as obscure as a randomly chosen page here.
[01:02:21 - 01:02:31]	 I can understand the impulse to want to get the universe into a book,
[01:02:31 - 01:02:38]	 because it hints at something that we've talked about in some of these circles, or whatever they are,
[01:02:38 - 01:02:50]	 which is that the character of life is like a work of literature.
[01:02:50 - 01:02:58]	 We are told that you're supposed to fit your experience into the model which science gives you,
[01:02:58 - 01:03:15]	 which is probabilistic, statistical, predictable, and yet it's the felt datum of experience is much more literary than that.
[01:03:15 - 01:03:24]	 I mean, we fall in love, we make and lose fortunes, we inherit houses in Scotland, we lose everything,
[01:03:24 - 01:03:30]	 we get terrible diseases, we're cured of them, or we die of them,
[01:03:30 - 01:03:40]	 but it all has this Straum und Drang aspect to it, which physics is not supposed to have, but which literature always has.
[01:03:40 - 01:03:46]	 And I think that, I don't know if it's true, but I think what Joyce believed,
[01:03:46 - 01:04:00]	 and what I'm willing to entertain at some depth, is the idea that salvation is somehow an act of encompassing comprehension,
[01:04:00 - 01:04:13]	 that salvation is an actual act of apprehension, of understanding, and that this act of apprehension involves everything.
[01:04:13 - 01:04:19]	 And this is why the alchemic, before James Joyce and this kind of literature,
[01:04:19 - 01:04:27]	 the only place where you've got these kinds of constructs was in alchemy and magic,
[01:04:27 - 01:04:42]	 the idea that through an act of magic the universe could be condensed to yield a fractal microcosm of itself.
[01:04:42 - 01:04:50]	 Well, then what Joyce is saying is that the novel, which was unknown in the alchemical era, the novel comes later,
[01:04:50 - 01:04:56]	 I mean, arguably, but the real zest for the novel comes in the 19th century,
[01:04:56 - 01:05:09]	 that the novel is the alchemical retort into which these theories of how things work can be cast.
[01:05:09 - 01:05:19]	 I think the great modern exponent of this, although now dead, and certainly one who owed an enormous debt to Joyce,
[01:05:19 - 01:05:24]	 was Vladimir Nabokov, especially in Ada.
[01:05:24 - 01:05:31]	 Ada is his paean of praise to Finnegan's Wake, basically,
[01:05:31 - 01:05:40]	 and the idea tacked in there is the idea of causality and ordinary cause-uistry.
[01:05:40 - 01:05:49]	 See, what all these people are saying, I think, and what the psychedelic experience argues for as well,
[01:05:49 - 01:06:01]	 is that we are somehow prisoners of language, and that somehow, you know, if we are prisoners of language,
[01:06:01 - 01:06:08]	 then the key which will set us loose is somehow also made of language.
[01:06:08 - 01:06:10]	 What else could fit the lock?
[01:06:10 - 01:06:22]	 So, somehow, an act of poetic leisure-dormaine is necessary, and Joyce, in Finnegan's Wake,
[01:06:22 - 01:06:28]	 I mean, he didn't live to argue the case or to work it out, he died shortly after,
[01:06:28 - 01:06:37]	 but this comes about as close as anybody ever came to actually pushing the entire contents of the universe
[01:06:37 - 01:06:42]	 down into about 14 cubic inches.
[01:06:42 - 01:06:55]	 Joyce and Proust had one meeting, and supposedly, Joyce said to Proust,
[01:06:55 - 01:06:58]	 "I'm too young for you to teach me anything."
[01:06:58 - 01:07:02]	 Are you all familiar with the remembrance of things past?
[01:07:02 - 01:07:06]	 Well, it could hardly be a more different work of literature.
[01:07:06 - 01:07:14]	 I mean, it is stately and cinematic, and you always know where you are, and the characters are defined.
[01:07:14 - 01:07:21]	 It's an old-style novel, but there are places in it where he just takes flight
[01:07:21 - 01:07:29]	 and prefigures the kind of writing that Faulkner and Joyce were able to do.
[01:07:29 - 01:07:38]	 As far as psychedelic influences, I don't know that there are arguably any.
[01:07:38 - 01:07:43]	 Joyce lived in Trieste for a while and taught English.
[01:07:43 - 01:07:52]	 He may have been, as a habitué of Paris, he may have been familiar with hashish.
[01:07:52 - 01:08:04]	 He probably had some familiarity with absinthe, but I doubt that it was a lifestyle for him.
[01:08:04 - 01:08:11]	 I think that the whole of the 20th century is informed by this hyperdimensional understanding,
[01:08:11 - 01:08:25]	 and that Jung tapping into it in the '20s, the Dadaists in 1919 in Zurich, the Surrealists even earlier,
[01:08:25 - 01:08:31]	 the École de Patte Physique, L'Entrement Jari, all of these people.
[01:08:31 - 01:08:42]	 What it's about, the 20th century, is this, well, McLuhan's phrase comes to mind,
[01:08:42 - 01:08:48]	 the Gutenberg Galaxy, the spectrum of effects created by print.
[01:08:48 - 01:08:55]	 The classes, the conceits, the industries, the products, the attitudes, the garments,
[01:08:55 - 01:09:06]	 all of the things created by print, and we are living in a terminal civilization.
[01:09:06 - 01:09:12]	 I mean, I don't want to say dying, because civilizations aren't animals,
[01:09:12 - 01:09:17]	 but we are living in an age of great self-summation.
[01:09:17 - 01:09:25]	 What we look back at is basically since the fall of Rome,
[01:09:25 - 01:09:31]	 there has been an unbroken working out of certain themes.
[01:09:31 - 01:09:37]	 Scholasticism, the Aristotelian and Platonic corpuses,
[01:09:37 - 01:09:48]	 Christianity always presented as somehow a rival to science, is in fact, paves the way for science.
[01:09:48 - 01:09:52]	 There would have been no science had there not been William of Ockham,
[01:09:52 - 01:09:57]	 who was a 14th century nominalist theologian.
[01:09:57 - 01:10:04]	 Really, Western civilization has had a thousand years to work its magic,
[01:10:04 - 01:10:12]	 and now there is a summation underway, and I don't certainly presume,
[01:10:12 - 01:10:15]	 at least not this evening, to judge it.
[01:10:15 - 01:10:22]	 How do you place a value on an entire civilization?
[01:10:22 - 01:10:35]	 But in the same way that when a person dies, their entire life passes before them in review.
[01:10:35 - 01:10:49]	 When a civilization dies, it hypnagogically cycles the detritus of centuries and centuries of struggle to understand.
[01:10:49 - 01:11:02]	 And someone like Joyce, I think, just brings that to an excruciating climax, because it's all there.
[01:11:02 - 01:11:10]	 It's all there, from the smile that tugs at the lips of the woman in the Arnolfini wedding,
[01:11:10 - 01:11:20]	 to quantum physics, to what Molière said to his niece in the 15th letter, and so forth and so on.
[01:11:20 - 01:11:25]	 And the task is to hold it in your mind.
[01:11:25 - 01:11:38]	 I think it was William James who said, "If we don't read the books with which we carefully line our apartments,
[01:11:38 - 01:11:42]	 then we're no better than our dogs and cats."
[01:11:42 - 01:11:48]	 And too often this is lost sight of.
[01:11:48 - 01:11:53]	 And the point of it, it's not simply that we are esthetes, literatures,
[01:11:53 - 01:11:59]	 and that here in the twilight of the gods we should sit around reading James Joyce.
[01:11:59 - 01:12:01]	 That isn't the point.
[01:12:01 - 01:12:07]	 The point is that this is the distillation of our experience of what it is to be human,
[01:12:07 - 01:12:20]	 and it's out of these kinds of distilling processes that we can launch some kind of new dispensation
[01:12:20 - 01:12:27]	 for the human enterprise, because we have played it out.
[01:12:27 - 01:12:32]	 It's now a set piece, all of it.
[01:12:32 - 01:12:44]	 I listen to rock and roll now. It's interesting to me, but it has the completedness of polyphony.
[01:12:44 - 01:12:51]	 It's a done deal somehow, and we're looking backward and we're anticipating.
[01:12:51 - 01:12:56]	 And the purpose of literature, I think, is to illuminate the past
[01:12:56 - 01:13:01]	 and to give a certain guidance as we move into the future.
[01:13:01 - 01:13:12]	 And this book, by being at first so opaque and so challenging to aesthetic canons and social values,
[01:13:12 - 01:13:21]	 eventually emerges as a very prescient insight into our circumstance.
[01:13:21 - 01:13:25]	 The Ballad of Finnegan's Wake has hundreds of verses,
[01:13:25 - 01:13:32]	 and in an Irish pub it can keep people going all night long.
[01:13:32 - 01:13:42]	 It's a celebration of complexity and of the human journey, and Joyce doesn't judge.
[01:13:42 - 01:13:46]	 I mean, you know, it says somewhere in Finnegan's Wake,
[01:13:46 - 01:13:50]	 "Here in Moycain," which is the red light district of Dunblane,
[01:13:50 - 01:13:57]	 "Here in Moycain we flop on the seamy side, but up 'ne end, prospector,
[01:13:57 - 01:14:02]	 you sprout all your worth and woof your wings.
[01:14:02 - 01:14:06]	 So if you want to be phoenixed, come and be parked."
[01:14:06 - 01:14:08]	 That's that passage about death.
[01:14:08 - 01:14:13]	 "Here in Moycain we flop on the seamy side, but up 'ne end,
[01:14:13 - 01:14:16]	 you sprout all your worth and woof your wings."
[01:14:16 - 01:14:25]	 It was a very optimistic, transformative sort of vision.
[01:14:25 - 01:14:30]	 Somehow complexity is the ocean we have to learn to surf.
[01:14:30 - 01:14:31]	 The river.
[01:14:31 - 01:14:36]	 Yes, that's the river, and that's the psychedelic side of it.
[01:14:36 - 01:14:40]	 I mean, imagine that you can get 63,000 different words in here,
[01:14:40 - 01:14:48]	 tell a story, and have all the common articles and modifiers operating normally anyway.
[01:14:48 - 01:14:54]	 And then it's very optimistic.
[01:14:54 - 01:15:04]	 I mean, Molly Bloom's speech is probably the single most optimistic outpouring
[01:15:04 - 01:15:07]	 in all of 20th century literature.
[01:15:07 - 01:15:11]	 Not that there was much competition, but...
[01:15:11 - 01:15:17]	 Yes, yes, the final affirmation, yes.
[01:15:17 - 01:15:22]	 Sam Beckett, Nobel Prize winner, genius in his own right,
[01:15:22 - 01:15:26]	 but secretary to James Joyce for many, many years,
[01:15:26 - 01:15:34]	 and passionately in love with Joyce's tragically schizophrenic daughter.
[01:15:34 - 01:15:39]	 You know, you want an unhappy story, the story of Sam...
[01:15:39 - 01:15:45]	 You'll find out why Sam Beckett is not exactly laughing all the time in his work.
[01:15:45 - 01:15:51]	 A very, very complex relationship to Joyce's schizophrenic child.
[01:15:51 - 01:15:54]	 Joyce's family life was not very happy.
[01:15:54 - 01:15:59]	 I think he had a wonderfully sensuous life with Nora,
[01:15:59 - 01:16:03]	 but I don't know what it would be like to be the guy who wrote this book
[01:16:03 - 01:16:10]	 and live with a woman who thought you would be better off as a saloon singer.
[01:16:10 - 01:16:14]	 Not exactly a saloon singer, I mean, he did...
[01:16:14 - 01:16:20]	 But still, shall I try and find a passage?
[01:16:20 - 01:16:24]	 Let us now, whether health, dangers, public orders,
[01:16:24 - 01:16:28]	 and other circumstances permitting, of perfectly convenient,
[01:16:28 - 01:16:34]	 if you police after you, police, police, pardoning mine, ich bin so freisch,
[01:16:34 - 01:16:40]	 drop this jitterpokery and talk straight turkey, mate to mate.
[01:16:40 - 01:16:44]	 For while the ear, be we milk-alls or Nicolists,
[01:16:44 - 01:16:48]	 may sometimes be inclined to believe others,
[01:16:48 - 01:16:51]	 the eye, whether browned or nolanced,
[01:16:51 - 01:16:56]	 finds it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself.
[01:16:56 - 01:17:04]	 Hebius aureus et nun vidibis, hebius oculus ad hoc manis palipobatis,
[01:17:04 - 01:17:08]	 tip, drawing nearer to take our slant at it,
[01:17:08 - 01:17:13]	 since after all it has met with misfortunes while all underground.
[01:17:13 - 01:17:19]	 Let us see all there may remain to be seen.
[01:17:19 - 01:17:22]	 But I am a worker, a tombstone mason,
[01:17:22 - 01:17:26]	 anxious to police every, avary buries,
[01:17:26 - 01:17:30]	 and juley glad when Christmas comes his once a year.
[01:17:30 - 01:17:32]	 You are a poor Jewist,
[01:17:32 - 01:17:35]	 unctuous to police nopey-boppies,
[01:17:35 - 01:17:41]	 and tonny-belly solely when 'tis thine took o'er home gin.
[01:17:41 - 01:17:46]	 We cannot say eye to eye, we cannot smile nose from nose.
[01:17:46 - 01:17:51]	 Still, one cannot help noticing that rather more than half of the lines
[01:17:51 - 01:17:56]	 run north-south in the Nimsies and Bukhara-Has directions,
[01:17:56 - 01:18:01]	 while the others go west-east in search from Malazis via Bolgarab.
[01:18:01 - 01:18:05]	 For tiny tot, though it looks when schwump-hump-sling,
[01:18:05 - 01:18:10]	 alongside other enkanabula, it has its cardinal points for all of that.
[01:18:10 - 01:18:12]	 Tip.
[01:18:12 - 01:18:17]	 Now, this word tip, which keeps occurring throughout the text,
[01:18:17 - 01:18:24]	 no one is clear what it means, but Joe Camel's guess is
[01:18:24 - 01:18:29]	 it's a tree branch which is tapping against the window,
[01:18:29 - 01:18:36]	 and whoever is dreaming this huge hallucinatory gizmo of a dream,
[01:18:36 - 01:18:42]	 every once in a while the tap of the branch breaks through.
[01:18:42 - 01:18:47]	 McLuhan, I don't know how many of you recall him from the '60s,
[01:18:47 - 01:18:52]	 but he had for a very brief period of time, about five or six years,
[01:18:52 - 01:18:56]	 an extraordinary influence on American culture.
[01:18:56 - 01:19:01]	 You couldn't pick up a magazine or turn on the TV
[01:19:01 - 01:19:06]	 without hearing McLuhan, McLuhan, what he said, what he thought,
[01:19:06 - 01:19:08]	 what he predicted.
[01:19:08 - 01:19:14]	 He was consulting with Madison Avenue, with politicians, with Hollywood,
[01:19:14 - 01:19:21]	 so forth and so on, and his influence, he died in the early '70s,
[01:19:21 - 01:19:26]	 and his influence died with him, even though he had founded
[01:19:26 - 01:19:30]	 the Center for Media Study at the University of Toronto in Canada,
[01:19:30 - 01:19:35]	 he really seemed to spawn no highly visible successors.
[01:19:35 - 01:19:41]	 He was a unique personality and breakthrough,
[01:19:41 - 01:19:46]	 much in the same way that Joyce was a unique personality
[01:19:46 - 01:19:50]	 and spawned very few imitators.
[01:19:50 - 01:19:57]	 The irony of all this is that McLuhan did his journeyman work
[01:19:57 - 01:20:04]	 before he burst onto the world stage as this mysterious savant of media.
[01:20:04 - 01:20:09]	 He did his work as a Joyce scholar, that's what he was,
[01:20:09 - 01:20:16]	 literary critic, Joyce scholar, medievalist, that sort of thing.
[01:20:16 - 01:20:21]	 And then in the early '50s or middle '50s, he wrote a book,
[01:20:21 - 01:20:27]	 which I've never read, it's very hard to find, called The Mechanical Bride,
[01:20:27 - 01:20:34]	 that was his first testing of his ideas.
[01:20:34 - 01:20:39]	 McLuhan is primarily understood as a communication theorist
[01:20:39 - 01:20:45]	 or a philosopher of media, and that's what he talked about.
[01:20:45 - 01:20:51]	 He turned the analytical Western deconstructionist method
[01:20:51 - 01:20:59]	 on the technologies of communication, printing, film, photography, dance,
[01:20:59 - 01:21:06]	 theater, even such things as money, he thought of as forms of media.
[01:21:06 - 01:21:11]	 And he carried out and analyzed these various forms of media
[01:21:11 - 01:21:17]	 and reached very controversial conclusions.
[01:21:17 - 01:21:22]	 One of the things that was puzzling to me as I went back through and read all this
[01:21:22 - 01:21:28]	 is one of the things was McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the '60s.
[01:21:28 - 01:21:32]	 I mean, the whole thing was, "Who can understand this guy?
[01:21:32 - 01:21:38]	 He's like Buddha, he speaks these words that we can't understand."
[01:21:38 - 01:21:44]	 Well, now, 25, 30 years later, it reads pretty straightforwardly,
[01:21:44 - 01:21:49]	 and most of what he's predicted has come to pass.
[01:21:49 - 01:21:54]	 I think even McLuhan would be amazed at the speed with which
[01:21:54 - 01:21:57]	 the Gutenberg world has been overturned.
[01:21:57 - 01:22:05]	 I mean, there's no hint in here of home computers, let alone interactive networks,
[01:22:05 - 01:22:11]	 virtual reality, phone sex, and so forth and so on.
[01:22:11 - 01:22:15]	 But this was all grist for the McLuhan-esque mill,
[01:22:15 - 01:22:19]	 and he would have had he lived had much to say on this.
[01:22:19 - 01:22:31]	 It surprised me in reading this stuff how demanding it is on your own literacy.
[01:22:31 - 01:22:37]	 I mean, he assumes basically that the people he's talking to have read everything
[01:22:37 - 01:22:44]	 and have understood it, I mean, from Homer to Rabelais to Chaucer to Mad Magazine.
[01:22:44 - 01:22:48]	 He assumes you have a complete knowledge of modern film
[01:22:48 - 01:22:52]	 and popular print journalism and popular culture.
[01:22:52 - 01:22:57]	 All of this was grist for his mill.
[01:22:57 - 01:23:01]	 I'll show you the books I'm reading from and talking about,
[01:23:01 - 01:23:04]	 and then I'll actually read you a section of McLuhan,
[01:23:04 - 01:23:11]	 because it's a, like Joyce, it's a stylistic thing that you can't really encompass
[01:23:11 - 01:23:14]	 without getting your feet wet.
[01:23:14 - 01:23:21]	 This was his best-known book, probably, and this is the original paperback edition.
[01:23:21 - 01:23:26]	 This book was immensely discussed when it came out,
[01:23:26 - 01:23:31]	 and probably very little read, judging by the quality of the discussion.
[01:23:31 - 01:23:40]	 Understanding media, the extensions of man, this is how most people heard of McLuhan.
[01:23:40 - 01:23:46]	 And he followed it up with The Gutenberg Galaxy.
[01:23:46 - 01:23:50]	 These are all first editions. These books, I don't think, are in print.
[01:23:50 - 01:23:59]	 Few intellectuals in this century have fallen so totally through the cracks as McLuhan.
[01:23:59 - 01:24:04]	 The Gutenberg Galaxy, very interesting. I'm going to read from some of it tonight.
[01:24:04 - 01:24:09]	 It's organized around chapter headings such as,
[01:24:09 - 01:24:15]	 "Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses
[01:24:15 - 01:24:18]	 and change mental processes?"
[01:24:18 - 01:24:26]	 Or, "Pope's duncead indicates the printed book as the agent of a primitivistic
[01:24:26 - 01:24:34]	 and romantic revival. Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal horde.
[01:24:34 - 01:24:41]	 The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation."
[01:24:41 - 01:24:44]	 That's a chapter heading.
[01:24:44 - 01:24:50]	 "Topography cracked the voices of silence," and one of my favorite,
[01:24:50 - 01:24:58]	 "Heidegger surfboards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave."
[01:24:58 - 01:25:06]	 So there's a lot of fun in McLuhan, and this comes out of his being a Joyce scholar.
[01:25:06 - 01:25:10]	 You just can't mess with that without fun.
[01:25:10 - 01:25:16]	 This is his third book with Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point,
[01:25:16 - 01:25:19]	 Space in Poetry and Painting.
[01:25:19 - 01:25:26]	 And I guess I should say, a few years ago somebody asked me to review McLuhan's letters,
[01:25:26 - 01:25:29]	 which had been published, which I did.
[01:25:29 - 01:25:33]	 It was Gnosis or somebody.
[01:25:33 - 01:25:39]	 Anyway, it brought back to me, he was a convert to Catholicism,
[01:25:39 - 01:25:50]	 and an extraordinarily complex intellectual with a medievalist who became a Joyce scholar,
[01:25:50 - 01:25:54]	 who became a communications expert.
[01:25:54 - 01:26:03]	 And in McLuhan there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the medieval world,
[01:26:03 - 01:26:06]	 of what he called manuscript culture.
[01:26:06 - 01:26:13]	 And essentially his entire output is a critique of print,
[01:26:13 - 01:26:20]	 and of the impact of print on culture.
[01:26:20 - 01:26:24]	 And I think though he attempted to be fairly even-handed,
[01:26:24 - 01:26:35]	 his final resolution of all this was that it had many, many detrimental and distorting effects
[01:26:35 - 01:26:38]	 on the Western mind.
[01:26:38 - 01:26:42]	 This is another little book he published back in the heyday,
[01:26:42 - 01:26:50]	 and he experimented with topographic layout, somewhat harkening back to the Surrealists,
[01:26:50 - 01:26:53]	 whom he discusses a great deal.
[01:26:53 - 01:26:58]	 And there was something about, it was his fascination with topographical layout
[01:26:58 - 01:27:05]	 that also brought him into such congruence with the wake.
[01:27:05 - 01:27:12]	 So let me read you a section from the Gutenberg Galaxy that is both interesting to think about,
[01:27:12 - 01:27:21]	 or if you can't understand it, then an interesting example of what McLuhan's style was like,
[01:27:21 - 01:27:26]	 and what I mean by that he was an extraordinarily demanding intellectual.
[01:27:26 - 01:27:29]	 He doesn't cut you much slack.
[01:27:29 - 01:27:31]	 This is a short section called,
[01:27:31 - 01:27:38]	 "Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic."
[01:27:38 - 01:27:44]	 Till now we have been concerned mostly with the written word as it transfers or translates
[01:27:44 - 01:27:54]	 the audio-tactile space of sacral, non-literate man into the visual space of civilized or literate or profane man.
[01:27:54 - 01:28:02]	 Once this transfer or metamorphosis occurs, we are soon in the world of books, scribal or typographic.
[01:28:02 - 01:28:10]	 The rest of our concern will be with books, written and printed, and the results for learning and society.
[01:28:10 - 01:28:17]	 From the 5th century BC to the 15th century AD, the book was a scribal product.
[01:28:17 - 01:28:23]	 Only one-third of the history of the book in the Western world has been typographic.
[01:28:23 - 01:28:31]	 It is not incongruous, therefore, to say, as G.S. Brett does in "Psychology Ancient and Modern,"
[01:28:31 - 01:28:39]	 and here's the quote, "The idea that knowledge is essentially book learning seems to be a very modern view,
[01:28:39 - 01:28:44]	 probably derived from the medieval distinctions between clerk and layman,
[01:28:44 - 01:28:53]	 with additional emphasis provided by the literary character of the rather fantastic humanism of the 16th century.
[01:28:53 - 01:29:00]	 The original and natural idea of knowledge is that of cunning or the possession of wits.
[01:29:00 - 01:29:09]	 Odysseus is the original type of thinker, a man of many ideas who could overcome the Cyclops
[01:29:09 - 01:29:13]	 and achieve a significant triumph of mind over matter.
[01:29:13 - 01:29:22]	 Knowledge is thus a capacity for overcoming the difficulties of life and achieving success in this world."
[01:29:22 - 01:29:25]	 So that closes the quote.
[01:29:25 - 01:29:36]	 Then McLuhan comments, "Brett here specifies the natural dichotomy which the book brings into any society,
[01:29:36 - 01:29:40]	 in addition to the split within the individual of that society.
[01:29:40 - 01:29:46]	 The work of James Joyce exhibits a complex clairvoyance in these matters.
[01:29:46 - 01:29:54]	 His Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, a man of many ideas and many devices, is a freelance salesman.
[01:29:54 - 01:30:01]	 Joyce saw the parallels on one hand between the modern frontier of the verbal and the pictorial,
[01:30:01 - 01:30:11]	 and on the other, between the Homeric world poised between the old sacral culture and the new profane or literate sensibility.
[01:30:11 - 01:30:21]	 Bloom, the newly detribalized Jew, is presented in modern Dublin, a slightly detribalized Irish world.
[01:30:21 - 01:30:30]	 Such a frontier is the modern world of the advertisement, congenial therefore to the transitional culture of Bloom.
[01:30:30 - 01:30:39]	 In the seventeenth or Ithaca episode of Ulysses, we read, "What were habitually his final meditations?
[01:30:39 - 01:30:51]	 Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty with all extraneous accretions excluded,
[01:30:51 - 01:31:03]	 reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms, not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life."
[01:31:03 - 01:31:09]	 In the books at the wake, James S. Atherton points out, and here's Atherton's quote,
[01:31:09 - 01:31:13]	 "Amongst other things, Finnegan's Wake is a history of writing.
[01:31:13 - 01:31:23]	 We begin with writing on a bone, a pimple, a ram's skin, leave them to cook in the mothering pot, and Guten Morgue with his Cro-Magnon charter,
[01:31:23 - 01:31:31]	 tinting fats and great prime, must once for omnibus step rubric red out of the wordpress.
[01:31:31 - 01:31:38]	 The mothering pot is an allusion to alchemy, but there is some other significance connected with writing.
[01:31:38 - 01:31:48]	 For the next time the word appears, it is again in a context concerning improvement in systems of communication.
[01:31:48 - 01:32:00]	 The passage is, "All the Irish signics of her dip and dump help a bit, from an father hogan to the mutter maskins."
[01:32:00 - 01:32:08]	 Dip and dump help a bit, combine the deaf and dumb alphabet signs in the air, or airish signs,
[01:32:08 - 01:32:16]	 with the ups and downs of the ordinary ABC and the more pronounced up and downs of Irish Ogham writing.
[01:32:16 - 01:32:23]	 The Mason following this must be the man of that name who invented steel pen nibs.
[01:32:23 - 01:32:30]	 But all I can suggest for mother is the mothering of Freemasons which does not fit the context,
[01:32:30 - 01:32:39]	 although they of course also make signs in the air. Is that perfectly clear?
[01:32:39 - 01:32:50]	 Now back to McLuhan. Guten Morgue with his Cro-Magnon charter expounds by mythic gloss the fact that writing meant the emergence of the caveman,
[01:32:50 - 01:32:58]	 or sacral man, from the audio world of simultaneous resonance into the profane world of daylight.
[01:32:58 - 01:33:05]	 The reference to the Masons is to the world of the bricklayer as a type of speech itself.
[01:33:05 - 01:33:12]	 On the second page of the Wake, Joyce is making a mosaic, an Achilles shield, as it were,
[01:33:12 - 01:33:21]	 of all the themes and modes of human speech and communication. By Meister Finnegan of the stuttering hand,
[01:33:21 - 01:33:31]	 Freemans Mauerer lived in the broadest way, immorginable, in his rush lit too far back for massages,
[01:33:31 - 01:33:40]	 before Joshua and Judges had given us numbers. Joyce is, in the Wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings
[01:33:40 - 01:33:52]	 of the entire history of the human mind in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture and technology.
[01:33:52 - 01:34:02]	 As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man.
[01:34:02 - 01:34:14]	 The Fin cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it awake, or awake, or both.
[01:34:14 - 01:34:23]	 Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream.
[01:34:23 - 01:34:30]	 He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious.
[01:34:30 - 01:34:40]	 This means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias in his "colliderioscope".
[01:34:40 - 01:34:49]	 This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses
[01:34:49 - 01:35:05]	 and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash, deor, savage, the oral or sacral, scope, the visual or profane and civilized.
[01:35:05 - 01:35:12]	 So, that's his comment. Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
[01:35:12 - 01:35:29]	 These people, Joyce, to some degree Pound, McLuhan, they were the prophets of the world in which we now stand.
[01:35:29 - 01:35:43]	 The world of integrated interactive media, extraordinary data retrieval that erases the 17th century notion of the unconscious.
[01:35:43 - 01:35:49]	 Nothing is now unconscious if your data search commands are powerful enough.
[01:35:49 - 01:36:07]	 And the remaking of the human image that required centuries for print, the transition that we talked about in here from scribal culture to true book culture,
[01:36:07 - 01:36:16]	 occupied 500 years, the transition from book culture to electronic culture has occurred in less than 50 years.
[01:36:16 - 01:36:28]	 I mean, it's eerie to read his examples of contemporaneity because there's stuff like Marilyn Monroe, Perry Como, James Dean.
[01:36:28 - 01:36:43]	 I mean, he's writing from another era and yet from his point of view he's firmly embedded in a kind of super future that we are now able to look back on.
[01:36:43 - 01:36:49]	 Here's another section that I think makes some of this more clear.
[01:36:49 - 01:37:00]	 The name of this section is, "The medieval book trade was a secondhand trade even as with the dealing today in old masters."
[01:37:00 - 01:37:09]	 From the 12th century onward, the rise of the universities brought masters and students into the field of book production in class time,
[01:37:09 - 01:37:16]	 and these books found their way back to the monastic libraries when students returned after completing their studies.
[01:37:16 - 01:37:26]	 A number of these standard textbooks, of which approved exemplars were kept for copying by the stationery of the universities,
[01:37:26 - 01:37:36]	 naturally found their way into print quite early, for many of them contained in undiminished request in the 15th century as before.
[01:37:36 - 01:37:42]	 These official university texts offer no problems of origin or nomenclature.
[01:37:42 - 01:37:50]	 And then he's quoting Goldschmidt. He adds, "Soon after 1300, the expensive vellum could be dispensed with,
[01:37:50 - 01:37:56]	 and the cheaper paper made the accumulation of many books a matter of industry rather than wealth.
[01:37:56 - 01:38:06]	 Since, however, the student went to lectures pen in hand, and it was the lecturer's task to dictate the book he was expounding to his audience,
[01:38:06 - 01:38:14]	 there is a great body of reporterata which constitute a very complex problem for editors."
[01:38:14 - 01:38:25]	 So really, like for Joyce, for McLuhan, the book is the central symbol of the age, the central mystery of our time.
[01:38:25 - 01:38:34]	 In a sense, I sort of share that notion. It's a very Talmudic notion. It's a very psychedelic notion.
[01:38:34 - 01:38:45]	 It's the idea that somehow the career of the word is the central overarching metaphor of the age.
[01:38:45 - 01:38:59]	 And naturally, if the book is the central metaphor for reality, then reality itself is seen as somehow literary, somehow textual.
[01:38:59 - 01:39:06]	 And this, in fact, is how I think reality was seen until the rise of modern science.
[01:39:06 - 01:39:16]	 We're always taught, you know, that the roots of modern science go back to democracy and atomism, which is, of course, true.
[01:39:16 - 01:39:23]	 But the number of people who knew that a thousand years ago was probably very few.
[01:39:23 - 01:39:43]	 The real notion out of which science had to divest itself is the notion of a book, or if that seems too concrete, a story, a narrative, the story of man's fall and redemption.
[01:39:43 - 01:40:00]	 That was what the Christian exegesis of post-Edenic time was all about. With the rise of modern science, the idea of narrative has become somewhat overthrown.
[01:40:00 - 01:40:14]	 McLuhan would say that narrative persisted far beyond its utility because the biases of print kept it in place for such a long time.
[01:40:14 - 01:40:20]	 Everyone assumes that tools are tools and you use them and that's that.
[01:40:20 - 01:40:31]	 For McLuhan, the entirety of the toolkit of modern Western man can be traced to the unconscious assumptions of print.
[01:40:31 - 01:40:40]	 For example, the idea of the individual, which is a pretty personal notion right there and close to the heart,
[01:40:40 - 01:40:58]	 the idea of the individual is a post-medieval concept legitimized by print. The idea of the public, this concept did not exist before newspapers.
[01:40:58 - 01:41:12]	 Because before newspapers there was no public. There were only people and rulers very rarely bothered to pass on their thinking to anybody other than their closest associates.
[01:41:12 - 01:41:29]	 And then only for utilitarian reasons, the notion of an observing citizenry somehow sharing the governance of society, this again is a print created idea.
[01:41:29 - 01:41:45]	 The idea of interchangeable parts without which our world would hardly function. There would not be automobiles, buildings, aircraft, interchangeable parts.
[01:41:45 - 01:41:52]	 That's an idea that comes from the interchangeability of letters in a printer's block.
[01:41:52 - 01:42:05]	 That was the first industry to ever utilize the concept of easily reformulated subunits.
[01:42:05 - 01:42:17]	 And it's strange, you know, the Chinese get credit for inventing printing thousands and thousands of years before Europe, but they would carve a single block of wood and print it.
[01:42:17 - 01:42:34]	 They didn't get the notion of movable type. And movable type, the distribution of books becomes the paradigmatic model for the distribution of any product.
[01:42:34 - 01:42:49]	 You know, it's produced, it's edited, it's manufactured, it's sold, and then sequels are spawned.
[01:42:49 - 01:43:00]	 All products have followed this model, but books were one of the earliest mass manufactured objects to be put through this cycle.
[01:43:00 - 01:43:17]	 Modern city planning, the linearity of it, the way in which land surveys are carried out, these are all unconscious biases imbibed from the world of print.
[01:43:17 - 01:43:33]	 And they make sense if you're a print head, but one of the peculiar things, notice that animals do not possess language.
[01:43:33 - 01:43:52]	 Many human societies do not possess writing, and very few human societies, and only two on earth, invented printing, and yet once invented it feeds back into the evolution of social structures and defines everything.
[01:43:52 - 01:44:03]	 And yet it's an extraordinary artificiality, and we have been imprisoned in it for hundreds and hundreds of years now. Now it is breaking down.
[01:44:03 - 01:44:15]	 And we are changing to a different sensory ratio, and you might suppose, if you hadn't given this a lot of thought,
[01:44:15 - 01:44:25]	 that the new electronic media, television, and so forth, would carry us into an entirely different sensory ratio.
[01:44:25 - 01:44:35]	 McLuhan felt differently. He felt that it was restoring us to a medieval sensory ratio.
[01:44:35 - 01:44:59]	 He felt that a television screen is much more like an illuminated manuscript than a page of print. The distinction may seem subtle at first, but if you're looking at an illuminated medieval manuscript, notice I said looking, you must look in order to understand.
[01:44:59 - 01:45:14]	 Reading is not looking. Reading is an entirely different kind of behavior. As a child, you learn what an E looks like, what a printed lowercase E looks like.
[01:45:14 - 01:45:35]	 After seeing 20, 100, 1000, 10,000, you know what it looks like. You have an expectation of the gestalt of the lowercase E, and nobody opens a book and looks at print unless there's some extraordinary abstract discussion going on.
[01:45:35 - 01:45:54]	 We read print, but we look at manuscript because manuscript carries the intrinsic signification of the individual who made it, and his or her idiosyncrasies have to be parsed through to get the meaning.
[01:45:54 - 01:46:08]	 Similarly with television, television is a very low resolution media. I mean, these are little pieces of light, pixels flying back and forth, and they must be looked at.
[01:46:08 - 01:46:24]	 They cannot be read, and it's an extraordinarily engaging process. That's why it creates an entirely different set of social biases than print does.
[01:46:24 - 01:46:49]	 And McLuhan called these biases, and this was the one distinction or one idea of his that made its way into popular culture. He distinguished between what he called hot and cold media, and usually people botch this every time because nobody really to this day understands exactly what he meant.
[01:46:49 - 01:47:02]	 So let me read you a little bit about this distinction. This is in chapter two of understanding media, and chapter two is called Media, Hot and Cold.
[01:47:02 - 01:47:20]	 "The rise of the waltz," explained Kurt Sacks in the world history of the dance, "was a result of that longing for truth, simplicity, closeness to nature, and primitivism with which the last two-thirds of the eighteenth century fulfilled.
[01:47:20 - 01:47:34]	 In the century of jazz, we are likely to overlook the emergence of the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles."
[01:47:34 - 01:47:39]	 But obviously it was. I mean, when you contrast it to what came before.
[01:47:39 - 01:47:52]	 There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV.
[01:47:52 - 01:48:06]	 A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in high definition. High definition is the state of being well filled with data. I love that.
[01:48:06 - 01:48:17]	 A photograph is visually high definition. A cartoon is low definition simply because very little visual information is provided.
[01:48:17 - 01:48:27]	 Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition because the ear is given a meager amount of information.
[01:48:27 - 01:48:37]	 And speech is a cool medium of low definition because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener.
[01:48:37 - 01:48:44]	 On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience.
[01:48:44 - 01:48:55]	 Hot media are therefore low in participation and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.
[01:48:55 - 01:49:04]	 Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like the radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the television.
[01:49:04 - 01:49:16]	 A cool medium like hieroglyphic or ideogamic written characters has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic alphabet.
[01:49:16 - 01:49:23]	 The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography.
[01:49:23 - 01:49:31]	 The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries,
[01:49:31 - 01:49:37]	 creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly.
[01:49:37 - 01:49:48]	 But the typical reversal occurred when extremes of monopoly brought back the corporation with its impersonal empire over many lives.
[01:49:48 - 01:49:58]	 The hotting up of the medium of writing to repeatable prints intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the 16th century.
[01:49:58 - 01:50:05]	 The heavy and unwieldy media such as stone are time binders used for writing.
[01:50:05 - 01:50:16]	 They are very cool indeed and serve to unify the age, whereas paper is a hot medium that serves to unify spaces horizontally,
[01:50:16 - 01:50:21]	 both in political and entertainment empires.
[01:50:21 - 01:50:23]	 And he just goes on like this endlessly.
[01:50:23 - 01:50:33]	 I mean, this was his metier or his medium to connect and comment on this stuff.
[01:50:33 - 01:50:42]	 And television really was his, both his own media for reaching a very large audience.
[01:50:42 - 01:50:46]	 In fact, I remember the excitement that swept through.
[01:50:46 - 01:50:48]	 I didn't even have a television.
[01:50:48 - 01:51:00]	 I was living in Berkeley at the time and somebody said, we have to go up to the Student Union at six o'clock because Mike Wallace is interviewing Marshall McLuhan.
[01:51:00 - 01:51:07]	 And it seemed an incredibly freaky notion that McLuhan would be on TV.
[01:51:07 - 01:51:16]	 It shows you what a stultified, categorically different world we were living in at the time.
[01:51:16 - 01:51:23]	 Here's just a little bit of McLuhan on television.
[01:51:23 - 01:51:29]	 This is chapter 31 of Understanding Media, The Timid Giant.
[01:51:29 - 01:51:37]	 Perhaps the most familiar and pathetic effect of the TV image is the posture of children in the early grades.
[01:51:37 - 01:51:45]	 Since TV children, regardless of eye condition, average about six and a half inches from the printed page,
[01:51:45 - 01:51:54]	 our children are striving to carry over to the printed page the all involving sensory mandate of the TV image.
[01:51:54 - 01:52:00]	 With perfect psychomimetic skill, they carry out the commands of the TV image.
[01:52:00 - 01:52:06]	 They pour, they probe, they slow down and involve themselves in depth.
[01:52:06 - 01:52:11]	 This is what they had learned to do in the cool iconography of the comic book medium.
[01:52:11 - 01:52:14]	 TV carried the process much further.
[01:52:14 - 01:52:22]	 Suddenly they are transferred to the hot print medium with its uniform patterns and fast lineal movement.
[01:52:22 - 01:52:26]	 Pointlessly they strive to read print in depth.
[01:52:26 - 01:52:30]	 They bring to print all their senses and print rejects them.
[01:52:30 - 01:52:38]	 Print asks for the isolated and stripped down visual faculty, not for the unified sensorium.
[01:52:38 - 01:52:39]	 You see?
[01:52:39 - 01:52:47]	 So often very unexpected paradoxical insights emerge from this stuff.
[01:52:47 - 01:52:55]	 And in this book that he did with Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, Space in Poetry and Painting,
[01:52:55 - 01:52:57]	 it's an interesting technique.
[01:52:57 - 01:53:08]	 They take a number of works of art, either literature such as the song from Love's Labour Lost by William Shakespeare
[01:53:08 - 01:53:16]	 or the Ballade de Bon Concieux of Geoffrey Chaucer or the Rubiat of Omar Khayyam
[01:53:16 - 01:53:20]	 and then comment on it and also visual arts.
[01:53:20 - 01:53:32]	 Because McLuhan really felt that the art historical and technological and architectural output of Western civilization
[01:53:32 - 01:53:41]	 could be essentially psychoanalyzed, could be seen as the tracings of the mass consciousness.
[01:53:41 - 01:53:51]	 And he felt that the evolution of sensory ratios within historical time had been very, very rapid.
[01:53:51 - 01:54:02]	 That, for example, he talks about how St. Augustine was a person of great piety and learning.
[01:54:02 - 01:54:13]	 And people doubting this would show him an open page of scripture or theological disputation.
[01:54:13 - 01:54:19]	 And he would look at it for a few moments, minutes, and then they would close the book
[01:54:19 - 01:54:22]	 and he could tell them what was written there.
[01:54:22 - 01:54:25]	 And this was taken as proof of his piety.
[01:54:25 - 01:54:32]	 He was, as far as we can tell, the only man in Europe who could read silently at that time.
[01:54:32 - 01:54:43]	 This was a period when the audio pre-scribble culture was still being assimilated.
[01:54:43 - 01:54:48]	 McLuhan spends a lot of time analyzing this episode in the 14th century
[01:54:48 - 01:54:59]	 when the laws of perspective spring suddenly into being as somewhat in the way, very similar in the way,
[01:54:59 - 01:55:06]	 that fractal mathematics have introduced us to a new super space.
[01:55:06 - 01:55:14]	 For the Renaissance, spatial perspective was essentially a filing system for visual data.
[01:55:14 - 01:55:20]	 At last they knew where to put everything and where to look for it once they had put it there,
[01:55:20 - 01:55:27]	 which if you have a pre-perspectivist arrangement of space, you have to look, not read,
[01:55:27 - 01:55:33]	 look at each painting in order to locate where the information is.
[01:55:33 - 01:55:36]	 This is again this read-look dichotomy.
[01:55:36 - 01:55:49]	 McLuhan never discussed psychedelics, but psychedelics I think clearly are an extension of these kinds of media
[01:55:49 - 01:55:57]	 that you have to engage with, that you have to look at, that you cannot read, you cannot take for granted.
[01:55:57 - 01:56:04]	 And these give back a much more complex world.
[01:56:04 - 01:56:15]	 I mean, notice that the world created by print is a world of gestalts, buildings, highways, bridges.
[01:56:15 - 01:56:18]	 We know how these things are supposed to look.
[01:56:18 - 01:56:26]	 We don't experience astonishment each time we enter a home or an institutional edifice.
[01:56:26 - 01:56:36]	 There is a built-in set of syntactical expectations in linear space, and when those are violated,
[01:56:36 - 01:56:45]	 this is very noticeable and becomes the basis for architectural or design innovation or something like that.
[01:56:45 - 01:56:50]	 I think that what's happening, and I think that this would be McLuhan's take,
[01:56:50 - 01:56:59]	 is that all of these new media that attempt to suppress the appurtenances of media
[01:56:59 - 01:57:06]	 are in fact having the effect of returning us to an archaic sensory ratio.
[01:57:06 - 01:57:08]	 And McLuhan was on to this.
[01:57:08 - 01:57:12]	 He is the one who coined the phrase "electronic feudalism,"
[01:57:12 - 01:57:19]	 and he felt that we were headed back toward the medieval sensory ratio
[01:57:19 - 01:57:22]	 because he saw television as like manuscript.
[01:57:22 - 01:57:31]	 But I think had he lived into the era of VR, psilocybin, HDTV, and implants,
[01:57:31 - 01:57:35]	 he would have seen we're not reaching back to the medieval.
[01:57:35 - 01:57:39]	 That was simply a stepping stone to the archaic,
[01:57:39 - 01:57:46]	 and that we are going beyond the entire domain of scribal humanity
[01:57:46 - 01:57:53]	 and actually reaching back to a shamanic feeling-toned kind of thing.
[01:57:53 - 01:57:58]	 And all of the breakdown of linearity that you see in the 20th century,
[01:57:58 - 01:58:07]	 abstract expressionism, da-da, jazz, rock and roll, non-figurative painting, LSD,
[01:58:07 - 01:58:17]	 all of these things on one level can be seen as, as I've said, as harking back to the archaic.
[01:58:17 - 01:58:25]	 But on another level, what they can be seen as are new behaviors emerging
[01:58:25 - 01:58:33]	 as the cloud of print-constellated constipation is lifted, it's breaking down.
[01:58:33 - 01:58:38]	 An interesting question that we would put to McLuhan if we had him here tonight, I think,
[01:58:38 - 01:58:48]	 is to what degree can what he said about television not be applied to HDTV?
[01:58:48 - 01:58:55]	 It seems to me that HDTV is television without the biases of TV.
[01:58:55 - 01:59:02]	 And, you know, a perfect medium is an invisible, a perfect media is an invisible media.
[01:59:02 - 01:59:07]	 And print is the least invisible of all media.
[01:59:07 - 01:59:19]	 I mean, print is an incredible Rube Goldberg invention for conveying information.
[01:59:19 - 01:59:24]	 Here's McLuhan on this same subject rather than me dwelling on it.
[01:59:24 - 01:59:27]	 This is from the Gutenberg Galaxy.
[01:59:27 - 01:59:35]	 This is a section called "A Theory of Cultural Change is Impossible Without Knowledge of the Changing Sense Ratios
[01:59:35 - 01:59:41]	 Affected by Various Externalizations of Our Senses," in other words, by media.
[01:59:41 - 01:59:48]	 It is very much worth dwelling on this matter since we can see that from the invention of the alphabet,
[01:59:48 - 01:59:54]	 there has been a continuous drive in the Western world toward the separation of the senses,
[01:59:54 - 02:00:02]	 of functions, of operations, of states, emotional and political, as well as of tasks,
[02:00:02 - 02:00:09]	 a fragmentation which terminated, thought Durkheim, in the anomie of the 19th century.
[02:00:09 - 02:00:16]	 The paradox presented by Professor von Bechse is that the two-dimensional mosaic is, in fact,
[02:00:16 - 02:00:19]	 a multidimensional world of interstructural resonance.
[02:00:19 - 02:00:27]	 It is the three-dimensional world of pictorial space that is, indeed, an abstract illusion
[02:00:27 - 02:00:32]	 built on the intense separation of the visual from the other senses.
[02:00:32 - 02:00:36]	 There is here no question of values or preferences.
[02:00:36 - 02:00:46]	 It is necessary, however, for any other kind of understanding to know why primitive drawing is two-dimensional,
[02:00:46 - 02:00:52]	 whereas the drawing and painting of literate human beings tends toward perspective.
[02:00:52 - 02:01:01]	 Without this knowledge, we cannot grasp why people ever cease to be primitive or audio-tactile in their sense bias,
[02:01:01 - 02:01:06]	 nor could we ever understand why men have "since saison"
[02:01:06 - 02:01:15]	 --that's in quotes-- abandon the visual in favor of the audio-tactile modes of awareness and of organization of experience.
[02:01:15 - 02:01:22]	 This matter clarified, we can much more easily approach the role of alphabet and of printing
[02:01:22 - 02:01:30]	 in giving a dominant role to the visual sense in language and art, and in the entire range of social and political life.
[02:01:30 - 02:01:38]	 For until we have upgraded the visual component, communities know only a tribal structure.
[02:01:38 - 02:01:48]	 The detribalizing of the individual has, in the past at least, depended on an intense visual life fostered by literacy
[02:01:48 - 02:01:52]	 and by literacy of the alphabetic kind alone.
[02:01:52 - 02:01:56]	 For alphabetic writing is not unique, but late.
[02:01:56 - 02:01:59]	 There had been much writing before it.
[02:01:59 - 02:02:07]	 In fact, any people that ceases to be nomadic and pursues sedentary modes of work is ready to invent writing.
[02:02:07 - 02:02:17]	 No merely nomadic people ever had writing any more than they ever developed architecture or enclosed space.
[02:02:17 - 02:02:23]	 For writing is a visual enclosure of non-visual spaces and senses.
[02:02:23 - 02:02:29]	 It is therefore an abstraction of the visual from the ordinary sense interplay.
[02:02:29 - 02:02:36]	 And whereas speech is an outering, utterance, of all our senses at once,
[02:02:36 - 02:02:40]	 writing abstracts from speech.
[02:02:40 - 02:02:42]	 That's very interesting, isn't it?
[02:02:42 - 02:02:50]	 That this association of nomadism to the inability to create architectonic space and therefore no writing.
[02:02:50 - 02:03:00]	 That a word is a structure, a written word is a structure, and therefore no nomad would ever do such a thing.
[02:03:00 - 02:03:02]	 Interesting.
[02:03:02 - 02:03:06]	 I think he's saying reading is not seeing.
[02:03:06 - 02:03:09]	 And those who read do not see.
[02:03:09 - 02:03:18]	 Even when they lift their eyes from their books, they carry the attitude of print into the world.
[02:03:18 - 02:03:21]	 They read, they attempt to read nature.
[02:03:21 - 02:03:23]	 And you can't read nature.
[02:03:23 - 02:03:25]	 You must look at nature.
[02:03:25 - 02:03:27]	 You must see nature.
[02:03:27 - 02:03:32]	 Personally, I think in my own life, I was thinking about this a few months ago and it surprised me.
[02:03:32 - 02:03:43]	 I'm trying to think of the books that really influenced my life and I thought of Moby Dick and Huxley's Doors of Perception.
[02:03:43 - 02:03:52]	 But then when I really got down on it, I realized that a little tiny book Huxley wrote that my mother pushed on me when I was about 12 years old,
[02:03:52 - 02:03:57]	 called The Art of Seeing, probably shaped me as much as anything.
[02:03:57 - 02:04:03]	 And in there, it's a very McLuhan-esque graph without McLuhan-esque terminology.
[02:04:03 - 02:04:11]	 And he says the way to overcome, and I think this is very, very, very intelligent and simple advice,
[02:04:11 - 02:04:20]	 Huxley said the way to overcome the print bias, and God knows, he was a Cambridge educated gentleman,
[02:04:20 - 02:04:27]	 and steeped in the traditions of English literacy and intellectualism, is freehand drawing.
[02:04:27 - 02:04:28]	 Draw.
[02:04:28 - 02:04:30]	 Train your eye.
[02:04:30 - 02:04:31]	 Draw nudes.
[02:04:31 - 02:04:32]	 Draw seashells.
[02:04:32 - 02:04:34]	 Draw insects and plants.
[02:04:34 - 02:04:42]	 Go into nature and train the eye to see, and you will cease to read the world.
[02:04:42 - 02:04:55]	 And readers are emotionally a person, a seeing person does not want to form a relationship with a reading person.
[02:04:55 - 02:05:05]	 You know this conflict that we get between men and women and between people about which we call the head-heart conflict
[02:05:05 - 02:05:09]	 is really a reading-seeing conflict.
[02:05:09 - 02:05:11]	 It isn't a head and heart.
[02:05:11 - 02:05:21]	 It's that readers and seers cannot relate to each other's emotional life because they seem to come from such different worlds.
[02:05:21 - 02:05:30]	 So yeah, I think you have a very good point, and the permission to abstract from nature that print created
[02:05:30 - 02:05:39]	 is why we have such a terrible culture crisis, you know, because, well, just kind of a trivial example,
[02:05:39 - 02:05:48]	 you know, it was said by Marshall McLuhan, strangely enough, that the Vietnam War could not be won the way an ordinary war is won
[02:05:48 - 02:05:56]	 because the citizenry of this country couldn't tolerate the sight of what war was,
[02:05:56 - 02:06:04]	 and that modern warfare became impossible when it could be televised into the living room
[02:06:04 - 02:06:11]	 because war is something that you must read about. You must not see it.
[02:06:11 - 02:06:19]	 It must be this grand thing of the distant clash of armies and young heroes being created,
[02:06:19 - 02:06:28]	 but when it turns into amputation and maggots and screens of pain, the political fun goes out of it.
[02:06:28 - 02:06:37]	 So war is therefore a literary activity, and, you know, the one argument that can be made, I think, in television's favor
[02:06:37 - 02:06:40]	 is people don't like to see images of violence.
[02:06:40 - 02:06:45]	 If we have to show so much violence on television, let it always be real.
[02:06:45 - 02:06:50]	 The violence is only indefensible when it's vicarious.
[02:06:50 - 02:07:00]	 If it's real violence, you need to see it because it's happening in a world for which you bear a partial moral responsibility,
[02:07:00 - 02:07:07]	 and I think warfare has been remade by media in that sense.
[02:07:07 - 02:07:15]	 A lot of politics has been remade because imperial doings are usually ugly, brutal,
[02:07:15 - 02:07:25]	 and not something that you want to exhibit before the populace, and yet modern media makes that very difficult to avoid.
[02:07:25 - 02:07:32]	 You know, you get the notion of public morality, or, you know, the people won't stand for this.
[02:07:32 - 02:07:37]	 We have to get this story out. The people won't stand for this.
[02:07:37 - 02:07:42]	 Well, now, this is a moral dimension inconceivable in medieval or Roman times.
[02:07:42 - 02:07:45]	 What would it mean to say the people won't stand for this?
[02:07:45 - 02:07:54]	 So there's an attempt to create through the collectivity a kind of community of moral judgment.
[02:07:54 - 02:08:06]	 The medium is the message means that the medium is the thing which is making the difference.
[02:08:06 - 02:08:16]	 In all, every discussion you ever hear since the 60s about TV, for example, is it good, is it bad, terrible, wonderful,
[02:08:16 - 02:08:24]	 the always, the discussion hinges around what's on TV, and people say, "Well, television is terrible.
[02:08:24 - 02:08:28]	 It just shows violence," and then somebody else says, "No, television is wonderful.
[02:08:28 - 02:08:33]	 Those nature shows and news from far away and masterpiece theater."
[02:08:33 - 02:08:36]	 This is a stupid argument.
[02:08:36 - 02:08:45]	 What McLuhan meant by the media is the message is he meant that it doesn't matter what you put on TV.
[02:08:45 - 02:08:55]	 TV is TV. It has an intrinsic nature, and whether you're showing National Geographic specials or slasher movies,
[02:08:55 - 02:08:58]	 TV will do what it does.
[02:08:58 - 02:09:06]	 It has certain qualities, just like driving a car or skiing, certain muscles are going to be exercised,
[02:09:06 - 02:09:17]	 certain perceptual systems enhanced, others suppressed, and it's very hard for us to understand this
[02:09:17 - 02:09:24]	 because we have accepted this media so thoroughly into our life,
[02:09:24 - 02:09:35]	 but in fact it is shaping our value systems in ways that are very hard for us to suspect or even detect.
[02:09:35 - 02:09:41]	 I mean, television, for example, it's a drug.
[02:09:41 - 02:09:52]	 It has a series of measurable physiological parameters that are as intrinsically its signature
[02:09:52 - 02:09:55]	 as the parameters of heroin are its signature.
[02:09:55 - 02:10:01]	 I mean, you sit somebody down in front of a TV set and turn it on, 20 minutes later come back,
[02:10:01 - 02:10:09]	 sample their blood pressure, their eye movement rate, blood is pooling in their rear end,
[02:10:09 - 02:10:16]	 their breathing takes on a certain quality, the stare reflex sets in.
[02:10:16 - 02:10:23]	 I mean, they are thoroughly zoned on a drug, and when you think about the fact that the average American
[02:10:23 - 02:10:31]	 watches six and a half hours of television a day, imagine if a drug had been introduced in 1948
[02:10:31 - 02:10:36]	 that we all spent six and a half hours per day on average watching.
[02:10:36 - 02:10:43]	 And the one thing about drugs in their defense is that it's very hard to diddle the message.
[02:10:43 - 02:10:47]	 A drug is a mirror, but television isn't a mirror.
[02:10:47 - 02:10:56]	 Television is a billboard, and anybody who pays their money can put their message into the trip.
[02:10:56 - 02:11:01]	 This is an extraordinarily insidious situation.
[02:11:01 - 02:11:13]	 What McLuhan wanted to become, I think, was the founder of a general new sophistication about media,
[02:11:13 - 02:11:20]	 and he was essentially parodied to death by, guess what, media.
[02:11:20 - 02:11:26]	 They made of him an icon of cultural incomprehensibility,
[02:11:26 - 02:11:37]	 not since Einstein has somebody, have you been so preprogrammed in advance to believe you ain't gonna understand this guy.
[02:11:37 - 02:11:46]	 And that's what they said about McLuhan, and consequently his message and his insight failed.
[02:11:46 - 02:11:54]	 We will have to reinvent McLuhan around the turn of the century because we are producing forms of media
[02:11:54 - 02:12:05]	 with such interactive power and potential social impact that we're going to have to go back and rethink all of this.