Marshall McLuhan James Joyce
Canadian Professor Marshall McLuhan spoke frequently of Finnegans Wake and shared it with his children.
"Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man." - Marshall McLuhan, Newsweek Magazine, p.56, February 28, 1966
“Listening to the simultaneous messages of Dublin, James Joyce released the greatest flood of oral linguistic music that was ever manipulated into art.”
— Marshall McLuhan
“The West shall shake the East awake… while ye have the night for the morn…”
— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”
“Lucky cocks for whom the audible-visible-gnosible-edible world existed.”
— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”
“Joyce is, in the Wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all the phases of human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let’s make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious.”
— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 7
Direct link to YouTube PlayList: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcYhoGnK9I9RNMf1ym3TxJTpGeBtBx4zy
“Joyce regarded the human language as the biggest storage system of human knowledge and perception anywhere. And his own use of that vast store of human perception was to retrieve from it in a pattern which made discovery natural: “Though he might have been humble there’s no police like Holmes.” And that’s retrieval.”
— Marshall McLuhan
“With Kiss. Kiss Criss. Cross Criss. Kiss Cross.”
— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”
“I done me best when I was let.”
— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”
“In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!”
— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”
“[And[ in fact, you’ll find the great instructors in all media matters are these painters and poets of the later nineteenth century and people like James Joyce and Eliot and Pound and others. They spent their lives studying our senses as they go out technologically into the environment because they realized this had a profound effect on language and on the medium that they were working with as poets.”
— Marshall McLuhan
“History as she is harped.”
— Harry Levin, “James Joyce” (“The Atlantic” #178) and “Explorations” #8 by Marshall McLuhan
“You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy?”
— James Joyce, “Finnigans Wake”
“The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That’s the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects.”
— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”
“Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey.”
— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”
“Conk a dook he’ll do.”
— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”
“Where the possible was the improbable and the improbable the inevitable…”
— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake
“With Kiss. Kiss Criss. Cross Criss. Kiss Cross.”
— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”
“Finnegans Wake is a book built entirely on this retrieval system: “Casting her perils before swains.” This is a phrase out of Finnegan, and it’s typical of the technique of Finnegan.”
— Marshall McLuhan
"As his title indicates (FINNEGANS WAKE), he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. The means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias is his "collideorscope". This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash: "deor", savage, the oral or sacral; "scope" the visual or profane and civilized." - Marshall McLuhan
"Joyce had devised for Western man individual pass-keys to the collective unconsciousness, as he declared on the last page of the Wake." - Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, page 268
McLuhan's original title for The Gutenberg Galaxy was "The Road to Finnegans Wake". He considered the Wake to be the greatest textbook of media study ever devised and quotes from it frequently in all of his work. One of the keys of Finnegans Wake is that it intends to reawaken the tribal ear, it's very much an aural book, meant to be heard and read aloud, and McLuhan sees it as a declaration to the new electronic society that we need to "lift we our ears, eyes of the darkness" (Finnegans Wake page 14 ). Re-entering the tribal word of Finn again, we can now be aWake this time. Thus the imperative angle of the title "Finnegans: Wake!" As McLuhan puts it, "[Joyce] discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious." (Guttenberg Galaxy page 75). Paragraph source: https://www.abuildingroam.com/2012/11/potent-quotables-gutenberg-galaxy.html