ATMOSPHERICS volume 1, no. 1 Summer 1994 ========================================================= Atmospherics Volume 1, number 1 Summer 1994 ========================================================= Contents When Father crossed the line G. L. Eikenberry At a nameless bend in the river Colin Morton We are always leaving, Sandra Colin Morton Woman on her Way to Market Colin Morton The Orality/Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the pre-history of Cyberspace Donald F. Thall The Movers E. Russell Smith ========================================================= Susan Keeping, editor Submissions, requests and correspondance: joyce@io.org ========================================================= This text may be freely shared amongst individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editor. Rights to stories remain with the authors. Copyright 1994, the authors. ==================================================================== Editorial: Why start a literary journal when there are hundreds of them in cyberspace already? Well, it's always been a dream of mine to edit my own journal. I don't know when I first decided that this was my goal in life. Maybe it was after reading my 12th book about Paris in the 20's and 30's where expatriate American writers found a home. Ezra Pound, Jane Heap, and others edited literary magazines which gave their peers a platform when more established magazines turned up their noses at the new writers. I feel it is like that today. The New Yorker and the Atlantic are virtually impossible to get published in unless you are already a famous and well established writer. Cyberspace is the new underground, where anyone with the desire to can be published. There isn't any difference being read all around the world on the Internet than being read around the world in a printed journal. In fact, since the Internet is the hot new toy more people may read electronic journals than print ones. I don't know if Atmospherics will be superior to many journals already out there in cyberspace, I just know I will strive to make it a quality publication. If the stories, poems and essay found in this issue are any indication then there will be no problem with quality. So, enjoy this issue. If you like it tell your friends to read it, tell them to send submissions, spread the word! Hopefully, Atmospherics will be published quarterly. Susan Keeping, editor ___________________________ WHEN FATHER CROSSED THE LINE by G. L. Eikenberry It was raining. There was no other reason a twelve year old would hang around the house after lunch in the middle of July. The summer holiday had not yet gone stale. I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to convince myself I was more interested in a new model kit than trying to talk mother into letting me go to Al's to play football in his basement when Father threw open the back door and hit the kitchen like a tidal wave. It was just barely two o'clock. I couldn't think what might bring him home from work so early, especially in the middle of the week. "Michael, you're home. Good. Where's your sister?" He always talked like that when he was in one of his moods - - his jaw clenched, the muscles popping out below his temples, the furrows in his forehead deep enough to stick pennies in. I never knew anybody else that could yell as loud as he could, hardly opening his mouth. "I think she's at Valerie's." "Go get her. I want everyone here in half an hour. We're going on a trip." "A trip? Today? I was just starting a new model." It seemed a little too strange to get excited over. "No lip. Just move. Is your mother upstairs?" He didn't wait for an answer. "And tell that sister of yours no dawdling. Understand?" "Yes sir." I really beat it down to Valerie's and got back as fast as I could. Becky promised she'd be home as soon as she helped Valerie put things away. As I opened the back door I could hear Mother and Father upstairs. Their voices were loud. I was glad Becky wasn't back yet. I didn't think a seven year old should hear her such yelling. I was quiet so they wouldn't know I was back. Mother's voice was shrill, almost brittle, "I just don't understand why it has to be so soon. Why does it have to be this very day?" "When the Lord speaks, his servants act. They don't say, 'Give me a couple of days to sort things out,' They obey. I'm going down to the church. I expect you and the children to be packed and ready to go by the time I get back. Remember, we'll be needing warm clothes where we're going. Pack a supper. We'll be driving straight through." "Do you mind telling me where the Lord's supposed to be sending us that we'll need warm clothes in July?" "'Supposed to?'" He made a sound like some kind of animal. I heard it when he hit her. It scared me. I could only remember one other time when he had hit her. That was when she borrowed from the mission money to buy Becky's new Easter shoes on the last day of a sale. It didn't seem right that God always seemed to fit into the picture when he hit her. "I'll hear no more of your blasphemy. I'll be back before five. Be ready." I heard him on the stairs. I scrambled back out the door so I could pretend I was just coming in. "What took you so long? And where's your sister?" "I -- she --" "Never mind the excuses. Just get upstairs and help your mother. We leave as soon as I get back from church -- before supper. Your mother will pack some sandwiches for the car." The door slammed behind him. # # Nobody spoke. There was only the thrumming of the tires and the chattering of the valves in the rattly old Ford. Even Becky was quiet, and Becky was one of those kids that never stopped talking. At first I tried to ask questions like where were we going and when would we be back. I complained a little about not having any time to tell my friends. I knew that Father's sudden journey would pretty well wreck any chance I had of getting in with Al's crowd. You can't just disappear in the middle of summer without people thinking you're weird. I probably said a lot more than I usually would have because he was driving and he couldn't hit me. I was sitting on the other side of the car behind Mother. The only way he could get at me was by thundering away like he used to when I was little and he was afraid to hit me. That was before he quit drinking and got religious. If he came home drunk and forgot I was too little to hit I had to hide back in under the sink where he couldn't get at me. I could stay there for a long time. Then he'd boom at me with that big voice, cursing and saying nasty things. After he started going to church the words changed, but not much else did. "Michael, you will learn that there are some things a child does not question. There are some things that even a man does not question. Do you think the Lord gives a -- fig -- about how you get on with that those brats you idolize? You must put aside such things and embrace His Greater Purpose." "Yeah, well, okay, but --" "No buts. And don't get smug over there. I can stop this car and thrash you if I have to. Now be quiet and pray. Pray for the Lord's guidance, for His help to see beyond your petty, childish concerns. Pray that He will show you where you fit in His Plan." When he started in with the praying business I knew I was on the verge of going too far. I knew better than to get him too stirred up, even if he couldn't get at me right away. I shut up and sulked. Mother tried to reassure us as she passed out the sandwiches and carrot sticks, almost whispering vague assurances that things would be all right. That's when the car started to fill up with that thick, syrupy feeling that made everybody feel numb and not say anything. We didn't even have books. Usually when we travelled we had new books or something. There was nothing to do but read road signs. I tried to sleep, but I couldn't. The old car stink and the stickiness of the vinyl upholstery on my cheek wouldn't let me forget that I was in a lousy situation headed for something that was bound to be worse. When we crossed the line into Quebec, somehow, the way Father always talked, I expected everything to be different, but nothing changed. There wasn't even a line, just a sign. We were supposed to be going some place cold, but I couldn't figure out where. I wondered about places like the Yukon or the Northwest Territories -- some place like that wouldn't be so bad, but it couldn't be any place good like that. Even if we did go some place neat, he'd find a way to make it turn out bad. I wanted to be excited, but I couldn't. Everybody would just think I was on some kind of weird missionary trip with my weird father, Crazy Old Walter Cleary -- off on another God binge. That's the way they talked about Father. I heard them once in the barber shop when nobody in the back room, where Mr. Collins kept the rum and the poker deck knew I was there. I tried counting trees for a while -- not all the trees, just hardwoods bigger around than me. Then it got too for that. There was nothing left but thinking. I hated thinking at times like that. He told me to pray, but how was I supposed to pray? If I prayed the things I was thinking, the Lord would strike me dead. I hated anyone -- anything -- that would do rip me right out of the middle of the summer. Deep down, I didn't really believe God had anything to do with it. I had even thought about running away instead of getting into the car but I didn't dare. God's wrath was terrifying. Father's wrath was worse. # # It was dark -- like hiding in the hall closet, wrapped up in Grandpa's big black coat when I was six. We were almost the only car on the road. I had been sleeping. Father was still driving, his hands clamped to the top of the steering wheel, monster movie greenish from the glow of the dashboard lights. I wondered what time it was. I wondered where we were -- but not enough to shift around so I could look out the window. "Today we cross over the line into a new life. We re-dedicate our lives into the service of the Lord. Right now we're driving through Quebec. Tonight we sleep in the car. Tomorrow the car will be loaded onto a train and carried, with us, into Labrador. Then we'll drive over long, rugged roads eventually to come to a place where I was stationed during the war." No one had asked him anything. He just boomed out his revelation without warning. Becky woke up with a start and just about jumped out of her skin. I wanted to ask why the Lord couldn't think of someplace better than some hole at the end of the world where Father happened to have been during the war, but I knew enough to strike the question down before it ever crossed my lips. I had learned the habit of guilt quite well. I was agonizing over my doubt and my unspoken blasphemy when the flashing lights appeared in the rear window. At first Father seemed to accelerate -- not abruptly -- not enough to worry us. Then he eased off and brought the car slowly over to the shoulder. He was out of the car quickly. I heard Father say "I trust we can do this in your vehicle, officer. There's no reason for them to hear." That was it. At first I didn't catch on that Father was in really serious trouble. He had gotten speeding tickets before. But we sat there for a long time -- long enough for me to give up counting how many times the light on the R.C.M.P. car went around. Mother was trying not to let on that she was crying. She never cried over speeding tickets. When they moved Father to the back seat of the police car it finally began to dawn on me that God was off the hook. None of this had anything to do with God -- or at least, it hadn't been His idea. The rest of the night was a jumble. Mother told us to keep quiet and stay in the car when they came back to talk to her. Then, after a few minutes, the one big R. C. M. Policeman stood outside the car while she got back in and told us that Father would be going with the other "gentleman" while the one waiting by the car drove us to a place where we could spend the night. She said she would call Aunt Jo and Uncle Randy so one of them could come and drive us back home the next day. She didn't actually come out and say it, but I knew Father wouldn't be going with us. I didn't try to explain much to Becky except that we wouldn't be going to Labrador. After that there was a motel where everybody spoke French, and mother was out by the Coke machine for long time talking on a pay phone while Becky cried. It wasn't that she knew what was going on, it was just that everything was strange and she was tired. The only other thing I remember about the motel is that it was cold for July and the heat register smelled like the dust under the dresser in the spare room in Grandma's house. Later, the next day, came the long drive back in Uncle Randy's new red car while Aunt Jo drove Mother in ours. I never saw Father again after that night. Even after he got out of jail, Mother never allowed it. Father had worked in the maintenance department of a hospital. I guess he had been stealing drugs from the pharmacy for a long time. He never denied stealing them, but he claimed his actions were at the bidding of the Lord. He sent the drugs, anonymously, to a Christian mission group. The mission people grew suspicious of the unsolicited drugs that rarely matched their needs, and reported them to the police. I don't know how Father found out that they were on to him, but something happened make up his mind that the time had come to answer God's call in person and in a hurry. Of course I didn't know any of this at the time. I learned more than I'd like to admit -- some of it true and some of it pretty far fetched -- from the other kids over the next few weeks. Their mothers weren't censoring the news the way mine was. It kind of made me a celebrity for a while. The only thing that almost made me cry was the guilt I felt about not missing him. ______________________ At a nameless bend in the river We don't understand the first thing about most of what goes on around us. The operating system without which the disk drive won't boot. The inner workings of the sewage treatment plant downstream. Currents that lead fish to this reedy spot where we cast our lines from shore. How to cleanse the putrid streams of Eastern Europe. How a dollar is still worth a dollar after all that's gone down. Even this: why at sunset white-tailed deer come down to the river and graze unconcerned at our presence where all the parched afternoon they hid in shadow. The heaviness of flesh and bone we dream of more often than hold, and hold too tight sometimes, not quite believing. You. The simple rise and setting of the sun confound our pretentions. The way we still dial a touch-tone phone, confide our secrets more readily to pollsters than lovers. How we can speak in any voice other than our own. The constitution. How the fish we counted on slip our hooks and glide away into darkness. The red sky is omenless, our string bag empty. White-tailed deer lie panting in a field of clover under skeletal hydro towers. On the far shore throbbing windpipes unnumbered as leaves on the trees sing the only tune they know to the waning light. @ Colin Morton 1994 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- We are always leaving, Sandra and always returning. In a snowbound mountain pass near the great divide I read Cohen In Search of the Millenium and that other Cohen who sang of Montreal streets on his Aegean isle And on the red sands of a island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence I wrote of the joys of picking garbage from the post-war streets of Germany. Self-exiled Joyce established his claim to the streets of Dublin Blind Milton saw in the bright room of a dream his departed wife. And here's a prediction Sandra one snowy day before long you will look out on ice-bound Northumberland Strait and see this room in Ottawa all our faces around you and though you may write of Tierra del Fuego or Neptune or the dialogue of particle and wave we will see ourselves too reflected in your lines and thinking of you or dawn on the picket line or guitars in the desert we each will take up a pen and begin to write. @ Colin Morton 1994 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Woman on Her Way to Market No matter what negotiators said It cost her life to walk across a street - A sniper put a bullet through her head. She began to cross then crossed herself instead. An inky pool of blood grew around her feet No matter what negotiators said Around a table with the best intent. She wondered what to give her family to eat Then a sniper put a bullet through her head. Shots flew over her where she lay and bled Her last words out into the empty street. No matter what negotiators said. No time was given to remove the dead. None claim victory, none admit defeat. A sniper put a bullet through her head Then went home to supper, children, wife and bed To lose her memory in a sound night's sleep. No matter what negotiators said A sniper put a bullet through her head. @ Colin Morton 1994 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY: JAMES JOYCE AND THE PRE-HISTORY OF CYBERSPACE by DONALD F. THEALL University Professor Trent University Copyright (c) 1992 by Donald F. Theall all rights reserved. Reprinted from: _Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.3 (May, 1992) **************************** _The Gutenberg Galaxy_, a book which redirected the way that artists, critics, scholars and communicators viewed the role of technological mediation in communication and expression, had its origin in Marshall McLuhan's desire to write a book called "The Road to _Finnegans Wake_." It has not been widely recognized just how important James Joyce's major writings were to McLuhan, or to other major figures (such as Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Lacan) who have written about aspects of communication involving technological mediation, speech, writing, and electronics. While all of these connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic Joycean of them all, McLuhan, provides the most specific bridge linking the work of Joyce and his modernist contemporaries to the development of electric communication and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual reality. McLuhan's scouting of "the Road to _Finnegans Wake_" established him as the first major disseminator of those Joycean insights which have become the unacknowledged basis for our thinking about technoculture, just as the pervasive McLuhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an unconscious one, of our verbal heritage. In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the development of electromechanical communications, telematics and virtual reality. Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data: All the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to the particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.^1^ This "consensual hallucination" produced by "data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system" creates an "unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding."^2^ Almost a decade earlier, McLuhan's remarks about computers (dating from the late 70s) display some striking similarities:^3^ It steps up the velocity of logical sequential calculations to the speed of light reducing numbers to body count by touch . . . . It brings back the Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that "numbers are all"; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy in favor of decentralization. When applied to new forms of electronic-messaging such as teletext and videotext, it quickly converts sequential alphanumeric texts into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging ideographic summation, like hieroglyphs.^4^ McLuhan's "hieroglyphs" certainly more than anticipate Gibson's "iconics" and McLuhan's particular use of hieroglyph or iconology, like that of mosaic, primarily derives from Joyce and Giambattista Vico. It is not surprising then that McLuhan's works, side by side with those of Gibson, have been avidly read by early researchers in MIT's Media Lab^5^, for these researchers also conceive of a VR composed, like the tribal and collective "global village," of "tactile, haptic, proprioceptive and acoustic spaces and involvements."^6^ The experiments of the artistic avant-garde movements (such as the Dadaists, the Bauhaus and the Surrealists) and of individuals (such as Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Sergei Eisenstein or Luis Bunuel) generated the exploration of the semiotics and technical effects of such spaces and involvements. Duchamp, for example, became an early leading figure in splitting apart the presumed generic boundaries of painting and sculpture to explore arts of motion, light, movement, gesture, and concept, exemplified in his _Large Glass_^7^ and the serial publication of his accompanying notes from _The Box of 1914_ through _The Green Box_ to _A l'infinitif_. His interest in the notes as part of the total work echo Joyce's own interest in the publication of _Work in Progress_ and commentaries he organized upon it (e.g., _Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress_). Joyce also explores similar aspects of motion, light, movement, gesture and concept. So the road to VR and MIT's Media Lab begins with poetic and artistic experimentation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; later, as Stuart Brand notes, many of the Media Lab researchers of the 60s and 70s placed great importance on collaboration with artists involved in exploring the nature and art of motion and in investigating new relationships between sight, hearing, and the other senses.^8^ Understanding the social and cultural implications of VR and cyberspace requires a radical reassessment of the inter-relationships between Gibson's now commonplace description of cyberspace, McLuhan's modernist-influenced vision of the development of electric media, and the particular impact that Joyce had both on McLuhan's writings about electrically mediated communication and on the views of Borges, Cage, Derrida, Eco and Lacan regarding problems of mediation and communication. Such a reassessment requires that two central issues be discussed: (i) the crucial nature of VR's challenge to the privileging of language through the orality/literacy dichotomization used by many theorists of language and communication; (ii) the idea of VR's presence as *the* super-medium that encompasses and transcends all media. The cluster of critics who have addressed orality and literacy, following the lead of Walter Ong, H.A. Innis and Eric Havelock, have--like them--failed to comprehend the fact that McLuhan was disseminating a Joycean view which grounded communication in tactility, gesture and CNS processes, rather than promulgating the emergence of a new oral/aural age, a secondary orality. This emphasis on the tactile, the gestural and the play of the CNS in communication is a key to Joyce's literary exploration of a theme he shared with his radical modernist colleagues in other arts who envisioned the eventual development of a coenaesthetic medium^9^ that would integrate and harmonize the effects of sensory and neurological information in currently existing and newly emerging art forms. Joyce's work should be recognized as pioneering the artistic exploration of two sets of differences-- orality/literacy and print/[tele-]electric media--that have since become dominant themes in the discussion of these questions. _Finnegans Wake_ is one of the first major poetic encounters with the challenge that electronic media present to the traditionally accepted relationships between speech, script and print. (_Ulysses_ also involves such an encounter, but at an earlier stage in the historic development of mediated communication.) Imagine Joyce around 1930 asking the question: what is the role of the book in a culture which has discovered photography, phonography, radio, film, television, telegraph, cable, and telephone and has developed newspapers, magazines, advertising, Hollywood, and sales promotion? What people once read, they will now go to see in film and on television; everyday life will appear in greater detail and more up-to-date fashion in the press, on radio and in television; oral poetry will be reanimated by the potentialities of sound recording.^10^ -> BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY ********************************** The "counter-poetic," _Finnegans Wake_, provides one of *the* key texts regarding the problem presented by the dichotomization of the oral and the written and by its frequent corollary, a privileging of either speech or language. This enigmatic work is not only a polysemic, encyclopedic book designed to be read with the simultaneous involvement of ear and eye: it is also a self-reflexive book about the role of the book in the electro-machinic world of the new technology.^11^ The _Wake_ is the most comprehensive exploration, prior to the 1960s or 70s, of the ways in which these new modes created a dramatic crisis for the arts of language and the privileged position of the printed book. The _Wake_ dramatizes the necessary deconstruction and reconstruction of language in a world where multi-semic grammars and rhetorics, combined with entirely new modes for organizing and transmitting information and knowledge, eventually would impose a variety of new, highly specialized roles on speech, print and writing. Joyce's selection of Vico's _New Science_^12^ as the structural scaffolding for the _Wake_--the equivalent of Homer's _Odyssey_ in _Ulysses_--underscores how his interest in the contemporary transformation of the book requires grounding the evolution of civilization in the poetics of communication, especially gesture and language and the "prophetic" role of the poetic in shaping the future. As the world awakens to the full potentialities for the construction of artifacts and processes of communication in the new electric cosmos, Joyce foresees the transformation (not the death) of the book--going beyond the book as it had historically evolved. Confronted with this situation, Joyce seeks to develop a poetic language which will resituate the book within this new communicative cosmos, while simultaneously recognizing the drive toward the development of a theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium, "virtual reality." Since the action takes place in a dreamworld, Joyce can produce an impressively prophetic imaginary prototype for the virtual worlds of the future. His dreamworld envelops the reader within an aural sphere, accompanied by kinetic and gestural components that arise from effects of rhythm and intonation realized through the visual act of reading; but it also reproduces imaginarily the most complex multi-media forms and envisions how they will utilize his present, which will have become the past, to transform the future.^13^ The hero(ine)^14^ in the _Wake_, "Here Comes Everybody," is a communicating machine, "This harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole)" (310.1), an electric transmission-receiver system, an ear, the human sensorium, a presence "eclectrically filtered for all irish earths and ohmes." Joyce envisions the person as embodied within an electro-machinopolis (an electric, pan-global, machinic environment), which becomes an extension of the human body, an interior presence, indicated by a stress on the playfulness of the whole person and on tactility as calling attention to the interplay of sensory information within the electro-chemical neurological system. This medley of elements and concerns, focussed on questioning the place of oral and written language in an electro-mechanical technoculture that engenders more and more comprehensive modes of communication biased towards the dramatic, marks Joyce as a key figure in the pre-history of virtual reality. Acutely sensitive to the inseparable involvement of speech, script, and print with the visual, the auditory, the kinesthetic and other modes of expression, Joyce roots all communication in gesture: "In the beginning was the gest he jousstly says" (468.5-6). Here the originary nature of gesture (gest, F. geste = gesture)^15^ is linked with the mechanics of humor (i.e., jest) and to telling a tale (gest as a feat and a tale or romance). Gestures, like signals and flashing lights that provide elementary mechanical systems for communications, are "words of silent power" (345.19). A traffic crossing sign, "Belisha beacon, beckon bright" (267.12), exemplifies such situations "Where flash becomes word and silents selfloud." Since gestures, and ultimately all acts of communication, are generated from the body, the "gest" as "flesh without word" (468.5-6) is "a flash" that becomes word and "communicake[s] with the original sinse" [originary sense + the temporal, "since" + original sin (239.1)]. "Communicake" parallels eating to speaking, and speaking is linked in turn to the act of communion as participation in, and consumption of, the Word--an observation adumbrated in the title of one of Marcel Jousse's groundbreaking books on gesture as the origin of language, _La Manducation de la Parole_ ("The Mastication of the Word"). By treating the "gest" as a bit (a bite), orality and the written word as projections of gesture can be seen to spring from the body as a communicating machine.^16^ The historical processes that contribute to the development of cyberspace augment the growing emphasis, in theories such as Kenneth Burke's, on the idea that the goal of the symbolic action called communication is *secular, paramodern communion*.^17^ The _Wake_ provides a self-reflexive explanation of the communicative process of encoding and decoding required to interpret an encoded text, which itself is characteristically mechanical: The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let me take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman's tale posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas. (482.31-483.4) The dreamer as a poet, a Hermetic thief, an "outlex" (169.3)--i.e., an outlaw, lawless, beyond the word and, therefore, the law, "invents" the writing by originally discovering the reading of the book and does so by "raiding" [i.e., "plundering" (reading + raiding)].^18^ This reading encompasses both the idealistic "eschatology" and the excrementitious-materialistic (pun on scatology) within the designing of this "book of kills" (deaths, deletions, drinking sessions, flows of water--a counterpoint of continuity and discontinuity),^19^ a book as carefully crafted or machined as the illuminations of the _Book of Kells_ are. Seeing and hearing are intricately involved in this process, so the reader of this night-book also becomes a "raider" of the original "reading-writing" through the machinery of writing. It is a production "in soandso many counterpoint words" that can be read only through the machinery of decoding, for "What can't be coded can be decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for" (482.34). The tale that the pen writes is transmitted by the post, and the whole process of communication and its interpretation is an extension of the hand and of bodily gesture-language: "The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas" (483.3-4).[11] Orality, particularly song, is grounded in the machinery of the body's organs: "Singalingalying. Storiella as she is syung. Whence followeup with endspeaking nots for yestures" (267.7-9).^20^ The link is rhythm, for "Soonjemmijohns will cudgel some a rhythmatick or other over Browne and Nolan's divisional tables" (268.7-9). Gesture, with its affiliation with all of the neuro-muscular movements of the body, is a natural script or originary writing, for the word "has been reconstricted out of oral style into verbal for all time with ritual rhythmics" (36.8-9). Since the oral is "reconstricted" (reconstructed + constricted or limited) into the verbal, words also are crafted in relation to sound, a natural development of which is "wordcraft": for example, hieroglyphs and primitive script based on drawings or mnemonic devices.^21^ Runes and ogham are literally "woodwordings," so pre- or proto-writing (i.e., syllabic writing) is already "a mechanization of the word," which is itself implicit in the body's use of gesture. Joyce's practice and his theoretical orientation imply that as the road to cyberspace unfolds, the very nature of the word, the image, and the icon also changes. Under the impact of electric communication, it is once again clear that the concept of the word must embrace artifacts and events as well.^22^ Writing and speech are subsumed into entirely new relationships with non-phonemic sound, image, gesture, movement, rhythm, and all modes of sensory input, especially the tactile. To continue to speak about a dichotomy of orality versus literacy is a misleading over-simplification of the role that electric media play in this transformation, a role best comprehended through historical knowledge of the earliest stages of human communication where objects, gestures and movements apparently intermingled with verbal and non-verbal sounds. Marschak's study of early cultural artifacts, the Aschers' discussion of the quipu, and Levi-Strauss's discussions of the kinship system demonstrate the relative complexity of some ancient, non-linguistic systems of communication.^23^ Adapting Vico's speculation that human communication begins with the gestures and material symbols of the "mute," Joyce early in the _Wake_ presents an encounter between two characters whose names deliberately echo Mutt and Jeff of comic strip fame. Mutt (until recently a mute) and Jute (a nomadic invader) "excheck a few strong verbs weak oach eather" (16.8-9). Beginning with gesture, hieroglyph and rune, Joyce traces human communication through its complex, labyrinthine development, right down to the TV and what it bodes for the future. For example, an entire episode of the _Wake_ (I,5)^24^ is devoted to the technology of manuscripts and the theory of their interpretation--textual hermeneutics--in which the _Wake_ as a book is interpreted as if it were a manuscript, "the proteiform graph is a polyhedron of all scripture" (107.8). At each stage, Joyce recognizes how the machinery of codification is implicit in the history of communication, for discussing this manuscript, he observes that on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world's oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced but not punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. . . . (123.34-124.3) This illustrates how the beginning of electric media (the telegraph) is a transformation of the potentialities of the early manuscript, just as any manuscript is a transformation of the "wordcraft" of "woodwordings." "Morse code" is indicative of the mechanics of codification, for while code is essential to all communication (thus prior to the moment when the mechanical is electrified), the role of codification is radically transformed by mechanization. The appearance of the printing press demonstrates the effect of this radical transformation: Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined . . . . (20.7-16) As "Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and great primer" steps "rubrickredd out of the wordpress," the dream reminds us that "papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints." Topics (L. topos) and types (L. typus) as figures, forms, images, topics and commonplaces, the elemental bits of writing and rhetoric, are now realized through typesetting. Implicit in the technology of print is the complex intertextuality of verbal ambivalence, for "every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined." Printing sets in place the "root language" (424.17) residing in the types and topes of the world and potentially eliminates a multitude of alternate codes such as actual sounds, visual images, real objects, movements, and gestures that will re-emerge with the electromechanical march towards VR and cyberspace. By the 1930s, in a pub scene in the _Wake_, Joyce playfully anticipated how central sporting events or political debates would be for television when he described the TV projection of a fight being viewed by the pub's "regulars" (possibly the first fictional TV bar room scene in literary history). Joyce's presentation of this image of the battle of Butt and Taff, which is peppered with complex puns involving terminology associated with the technical details of TV transmission, has its own metamorphic quality, underscored by the "viseversion" (vice versa imaging) of Butt and Taff's images on "the bairdboard bombardment screen" ("bairdboard" because John Logie Baird developed TV in 1925). Joyce explains how "the bairdboard bombardment screen," the TV as receiver, receives the composite video signal "in scynopanc pulses" (the synchronization pulses that form part of the composite video signal), that come down the "photoslope" on the "carnier walve" (i.e., the carrier wave which carries the composite video signal) "with the bitts bugtwug their teffs." Joyce imagines this receiver to be a "light barricade" against which the charge of the light brigade (the video signal) is directed, reproducing the "bitts." Although (at least to my knowledge) bit was not used as a technical term in communication technology at the time, Joyce is still able, on analogy with the telegraph, to think of the electrons or photons as bits of information creating the TV picture. Speech, print and writing are interwoven with electromechanical technologies of communication throughout the _Wake_. References to the manufacture of books, newspapers and other products of the printing press abound. Machineries and technological organizations accompany this development: reporters, editors, interviewers, newsboys, ad men who produce "Abortisements" (181.33). Since complex communication technology is characteristic of the later stages, in addition to newspapers, radio, "dupenny" magazines, comics (contemporary cave drawing), there is "a phantom city phaked by philm pholk," by those who would "roll away the reel world." Telecommunications materialize again and again throughout the night of the _Wake_, where "television kills telephony." The "tele-" prefix, betraying an element of futurology in the dream, appears in well over a dozen words including in addition to the familiar forms terms such as "teleframe," "telekinesis," "telesmell," "telesphorously," "televisible," "televox," or "telewisher," while familiar forms also appear in a variety of transformed "messes of mottage," such as "velivision" and "dullaphone." This complex verbal play all hinges on the inter-translatability of the emerging forms of technologically mediated communication. In the opening episode of the second part, the "Feenicht's Playhouse," an imaginary play produced by HCE's children in their nursery is "wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. In four tubbloids" (219.28-9). Like the cinema, "wordloosed" (wirelessed but also let loose) transglobally, all such media are engaged in a "crowdblast" of existing languages and cultures, producing an interplay between local cultures and a pan-international hyperculture. In the concluding moments of the _Wake_, Joyce generalizes his pre-cybernetic vision in one long intricate performance that not only concerns the book itself, but also anticipates by twenty years some major discussions of culture, communication, and technology. A brief scene setting: this is the moment in the closing episode just as the HCE is awakening. In the background he hears noises from the machines in the laundry next door. It is breakfast time and there are sounds of food being prepared; eggs are being cooked and will be eaten, so there is anticipation of the process of digestion that is about to take place.^25^ At this moment a key passage, inviting interminable interpretation, presents in very abstract language a generalized model of production and consumption, which is also the recorso of the schema of this nocturnal poem, that consumes and produces, just as the digestive system itself digests and produces new cells and excrement--how else could one be a poet of "litters" as well as letters and be "litterery" (114.17; 422.35) as well as literary? The passage begins by speaking about "our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon," which may be the book, a letter to be written, the digestive system assimilating the eggs, the sexual process, the mechanical "mannormillor clipperclappers" (614.13) of the nearby Mannor Millor laundry, the temporal movement of history, or a theory of engineering, for essentially it relates the production of cultural artifacts or the consumption of matter (like reading a book, seeing a film or eating eggs; the text mentions a "farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial, and hatch-as-hatch-can" (614.28)). The passage concludes, "as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there's scribings scrawled on eggs" (615.9-10). Here the frequent pairing of speaking (writing) with eating is brought to a climax in which it is related to all the abstract machines which shape the life of nature, decomposing into "bits" and recombining. These bits, described as "the dialytically [dialectic + dialysis] separated elements of precedent decomposition," may be eggs, or other "homely codes" such as the "heroticisms, catastrophes and ec-centricities" (the stuff of history or the dreamers stuttering speech or his staggering movements) transmitted elementally, "type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, sendence of sundance . . ." (614.33-615.2). All of these bits--matter, eggs, words, TV signals, concepts, what you will--are "anastomosically assimilated and preteri-dentified paraidiotically," producing "the sameold gamebold adomic structure . . . as highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it" (615.5-8). In anticipation of the contemporary electronic definition of the "bit," Joyce associates the structure of communication (ranging from TV and telegraphic signals to morphophonemic information and kinesthesia) with bits of signals, "data" and information. He presents it as essentially an assemblage of multiplicities, different from a synthesizing or totalizing moment, for it occurs by the crossing of pluralistic branches of differing motifs, through a process of transmission involving flows, particularly the flowing of blood, water and speech, and breaks such as the discontinuous charges of electrical energy, telegraphy, and punctuation--those "endspeaking nots for yestures" (267.8). -> BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY ********************************** Here Joyce's entire prophetic, schizoid vision of cyberspace seems somewhat Deleuzian. It is an ambivalent and critical vision, for the "ambiviolence" of the "langdwage" throughout the _Wake_ implies critique as it unfolds this history, since Joyce still situates parody within satire. He does not free it from socio-political reference, as a free-floating "postmodernist" play with the surface of signifiers would. This can be noted in the way that Joyce first probes what came to be one of the keystones of McLuhanism. Joyce plays throughout the work with spheres and circles, some of which parody one of the mystical definitions of God frequently attributed to Alan of Lille (Alanus de Insulis), but sometimes referred to as Pascal's sphere. Speaking of a daughter-goddess figure, he says: our Frivulteeny Sexuagesima to expense herselfs as sphere as possible, paradismic perimutter, in all directions on the bend of the unbridalled, the infinisissimalls of her facets becoming manier and manier as the calicolum of her umdescribables (one has thoughts of that eternal Rome) . . . . (298.27-33) Here a sphere is imagined whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, since it is infinitesimal and undescribable (though apparently the paradigmic perimeter is sexual), as the paradisal mother communicates herself without apparent limit. This is both an embodied and a disembodied sphere, polarizing and decentering the image so as to impede any closure. The same spherical principle is applied more widely to the presentation of the sense of hearing. The reception of messages by the hero/ine of the _Wake_, "(Hear! Calls! Everywhair!)" (108.23), is accomplished by "bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd" (309.22-4), a sphere for it requires "a gain control of circumcentric megacycles" (310.7-8). It can truly be said of HCE, "Ear! Ear! Weakear! An allness eversides!" (568.26),^26^ precisely because he is "human, erring and condonable"(58.19), yet "humile, commune and ensectuous" (29.30), suffering many deprivations his "hardest crux ever" (623.33) [italics mine]. Though "humbly to fall and cheaply to rise, [this] exposition of failures" (589.17) living with "Heinz cans everywhere"(581.5), still protests his fate "making use of sacrilegious languages to the defect that he would challenge their hemosphores to exterminate them" (81.25) by decentering or dislocating any attempts to enclose him. This discussion of sphere and hearing critically anticipates what McLuhan later called "acoustic space"--a fundamental cyberspatial conception with its creation of multi-dimensional environments, a spherical environment within which aural information is received by the CNS--that also embodies a transformation of the hermetic poetic insight that "the universe (or nature) [or in earlier versions, God] is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere."^27^ Today, VR, as Borges' treatment of Pascal's sphere seems to imply, is coming to be our contemporary pre-millennial epitome of this symbol, a place where each participant (rather than *the* deity), as microcosm, is potentially the enigmatic center. People englobed within virtual worlds find themselves interacting within complex, transverse, intertextual multimedia forms that are interlinked globally through complex, rhizomic (root-like) networks. All of this must necessarily relate back to the way Joyce treats the subject of and produces the artifact that is *the book*. While, beginning with Mallarme, the themes of the book and the death of literature resound through modernism, Joyce's transformation of the book filtered through the "mcluhanitic" reaction to "mcluhanism" becomes, in the usual interpretation of McLuhan, the annunciation of the death of the book, *not* its transformation, as with Joyce. Joyce is important, for following Marcel Jousse and Vico,^28^ he situates speech and writing as modes of communication within a far richer and more complex bodily and gestural theory of communication than that represented by the reductive dichotomy of the oral and the literate. As the predominance of print declines, the _Wake_ explores the history of communication by comically assimilating the method of Vico's _The New Science_--which, as one of the first systematic and empirical studies of the place of poetic action in the history of how people develop systems of signs and symbols, attributes people's ability for constructing their society to the poetic function. Joyce avoids that facile over-simplification of the complexities of print, arising from the orality/literacy dichotomy, which attributes a privileged role to language as verbal--a privilege based on theological and metaphysical claims. The same dichotomy creates problems in discussing technological and other non-verbal forms of mediated communication, including VR and TV. At one point in the _Wake_ "Television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!" (52.18-9), for TV also comprehends the visual and the kinesthetic. Yet most McLuhanites who have opted for the orality/literacy split still call it an oral medium in opposition to print. The same problem occurs when mime, with its dependence on gesture and rhythm, is analyzed as an oral medium. As the _Wake_ jocularly observes: seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the cheerio, he aptly sketched for our soontobe second parents . . . the touching seene. The solence of that stilling! Here one might a fin fell. Boomster rombombonant! It scenes like a landescape from Wildu Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb as Mum's mutyness, this mimage . . . is odable to os across the wineless Ere no dor nor mere eerie nor liss potent of suggestion than in the tales of the tingmount. (52.34-53.6) The mime plays with silence, sight, touch and movement seeming like a landscape or a movie. Facile over-simplification also overlooks that long before the beginnings of the trend towards cyberspace, print had not been strictly oriented towards linearity and writing, for the print medium was supplemented by its encyclopedic, multi-media nature, absorbing other media such as illustrations, charts, graphs, maps, diagrams, and tables, not all aspects of which are precisely linear. While writing may have had a predominantly linear tendency, its history is far more complex, as Elizabeth Eisenstein has established.^29^ The orality/literacy distinction does not provide an adequately rich concept for dealing with print, any more than it does for the most complex and comprehensive images of virtual reality and participatory hyperspace (e.g., sophisticated extensions of the datagloves or the Aspen map), which, to adapt a Joycean phrase, directly transmit "feelful thinkamalinks." Since VR should enable a person to feel the bodily set of another person or place, while simultaneously receiving multiple intersensory messages, understanding the role of the body in communication is crucial for understanding VR. When McLuhan and Edward Carpenter first spoke about their concept of orality (linked to aurality, mouth to ear, as line of print to eye scan), it entailed recognizing the priority and primacy of tactility and inter-sensory activity in communication, for "In the beginning there was the gest." As Kenneth Burke realized in the 30s, Joyce's grounding communication and language in gesture is distinctly different from an approach which privileges language, for it involves a complete embodying of communication. While the oral only embodies the speech organs, the entire CNS is necessarily involved in all communication, including speech. As John Bishop has shown in _Joyce's Book of the Dark_, the sleeper primarily receives sensations with his ear, but these are tranformed within the body into the world of signs that permeate the dream and which constitute the _Wake_.^30^ Joyce views language as "gest," as an imaginary means of embodying intellectual-emotional complexes, his "feelful thinkamalinks." From this perspective, the semic units of the _Wake_ (integrated complexes constructed from the interaction of speech and print involving, rhythm, orthography as sign and gesture and visual image) assume the role of dialogue with other modes of mediated communication, exploiting their limitations and differences. Joyce crafts a new lingua for a world where the poetic book will deal with those aspects of the imaginary that cannot be encompassed within technologically mediated communication. Simultaneously, he recognizes that a trend towards virtual reality is characteristic of the electro-mechanically or technologically mediated modes of communication. This process posits a continuous dialogue in which _Ulysses_ and the _Wake_ were designed to play key roles. As Joyce--who quipped that "some of the means I use are trivial--and some are quadrivial"^31^--was aware, ancient rhetorical theory (which he parodied both in the Aeolus episode of _Ulysses_ and in the "Triv and Quad" section (II, 2) of the _Wake_) also included those interactive contexts where the body was an intrinsic part of communication. Delivery involved controlling the body, and the context within which it was presented, as well as the voice. The actual rhetorical action (particularly in judicial oratory) also frequently involved demonstration and witnesses. This analysis, closer to the pre-literate, recognized the way actual communication integrated oral, visual, rhythmical, gestural and kinesthetic components. Recent research into the classical and medieval "arts of memory," inspired by Frances Yates,^32^ have demonstrated that memory involves the body, a sense of the dramatic and theatrical, visual icons and movement, as well as the associative power of the oral itself. Joyce playfully invokes this memory system familiar to him from his Jesuit education: "After sound, light and heat, memory, will and understanding. Here (the memories framed from walls are minding) till wranglers for wringwrowdy wready are . . ." (266.18-22). A classical world, which recognized such features of the communicative process, could readily speak about the poem as a "speaking picture" and the painting as "silent poetry." Here, there is an inclusiveness of the means available rather than a dependency on a single channel of communication. Joyce was so intrigued by the potentials of the new culture of time and space for reconstructing and revolutionizing the book that he claimed himself to be "the greatest engineer," as well as a Renaissance man, who was also a "musicmaker, a philosophist and heaps of other things."^33^ The mosaic of the _Wake_ contributes to understanding the nature of cyberspace by grasping the radical constitution of the electronic cosmos that Joyce called "the chaosmos of Alle" (118.21). In this "chaosmos," engineered by a sense of interactive mnemotechnics, he intuits the relation between a nearly infinite quantity of cultural information and the mechanical yet rhizomic organization of a network, "the matrix," which underlies the construction of imaginary and virtual worlds. One crucial reason for raising the historic image of Joyce in a discussion of cyberspace is that he carries out one of the most comprehensive contemporary discussions of virtual recollection (a concept first articulated by Henri Bergson as virtual memory).^34^ In counterpoint to the emerging technological capability to create the "virtual reality" of cyberspace, Joyce turned to dream and hallucination for the creation of virtual worlds within natural language. That tactile, gestural-based dreamworld has built-in mnemonic systems: A scene at sight. Or dreamoneire. Which they shall memorise. By her freewritten. Hopely for ear that annalykeses if scares for eye that sumns. Is it in the now woodwordings of our sweet plantation where the branchings then will singingsing tomorrows gone and yesters outcome . . . . (280.01-07) Joyce's virtual worlds began with the recognition of "everybody" as a poet (each person is co-producer; he quips, "his producers are they not his consumers?"). All culture becomes the panorama of his dream; the purpose of poetic writing in a post-electric world is the painting of that interior (which is not the psychoanalytic, but the social unconscious) and the providing of new language appropriate to perceiving the complexities of the new world of technologically reproducible media: What has gone? How it ends? Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today's truth, tomorrow's trend. (614.19-21) Joyce's text is embodied in gesture, enclosed in words, enmeshed in time, and engaged in foretelling "Today's truth. Tomorrow's trend." The poet reproducing his producers is the divining prophet. If speaking of Joyce and cyberspace seems to imply a kind of futurology, the whole of McLuhan's project was frequently treated as prophesying the emergence of a new tribalized global society--the global village, itself anticipated by Joyce's "international" language of multilingual puns. In fact, in _War and Peace in the Global Village_, McLuhan uses Wakese (mostly from Joyce, freely associated) as marginalia. McLuhan flourished in his role as an international guru by casting himself in the role of "*the* prime prophet" announcing the coming of a new era of communication^35^ (now talked about as virtual reality or cyberspace, though he never actually used that word). The prime source of his "prophecies," which he never concealed, is to be found in Joyce and Vico.^36^ The entire Joycean dream is prophetic or divinatory in part, for the anticipated awakening (Vico's fourth age of ricorso following birth, marriage, and death) is "providential divining": Ere we are! Signifying, if tungs may tolkan, that, primeval conditions having gradually receded but nevertheless the emplacement of solid and fluid having to a great extent persisted through intermittences of sullemn fulminance, sollemn nuptialism, sallemn sepulture and providential divining, making possible and even inevitable, after his a time has a tense haves and havenots hesitency, at the place and period under consideration a socially organic entity of a millenary military maritory monetary morphological circumformation in a more or less settled state of equonomic ecolube equalobe equilab equilibbrium. (599.8-18) Earlier, it is said of the dreamer that "He caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present . . ." (496.34-497.1). Joyce, from whom McLuhan derived the idea, is playing with the medieval concept of natural prophecy, making it a fundamental feature of the epistemology of his dream world, in which the "give and take" of the "mind factory," an "antithesis of ambidual anticipation," generates auspices, auguries, and divination--for "DIVINITY NOT DEITY [is] THE UNCERTAINTY JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE" (282.R7-R13). Natural prophecy, the medieval way of thinking about futurology with which Joyce and McLuhan were naturally familiar from scholasticism and Thomism, occurs through a reading of history and its relation to that virtual, momentary social text (the present), which is dynamic and always undergoing change. Joyce appears to blend this medieval concept with classical sociological ideas--of prophecy as an "intermediation"--quite consistent with his concepts of communication as involving aspects of participation and communion. It is only through some such reading that the future existent in history can be known and come to be. McLuhan's reading, adapted from Joyce, of the collision of history and the present moment led him to foresee a world emerging where communication would be tactile, post-verbal, fully participatory and pan-sensory.^37^ Why ought communication history and theory take account of Joyce's poetic project? First, because he designed a new language (later disseminated by McLuhan, Eco, and Derrida) to carry out an in-depth interpretation of complex socio-historical phenomenon, namely new modes of semiotic production. Two brief examples: Hollywood "wordloosing celluloid soundscript over seven seas," or the products of the Hollywood dream factory itself as "a rolling away of the reel world," reveal media's potential international domination as well as the problems film form raises for the mutual claims of the imaginary and the real. For example, the term "abortisements" (advertisements) suggests the manipulation of fetishized femininity with its submerged relation of advertisement to butchering--the segmentation of the body as object into an assemblage of parts. Second, Joyce's work is a critique of communication's historical role in the production of culture, and it constitutes one of the earliest recognitions of the importance of Vico to a contemporary history of communication and culture.^38^ Third, his work is itself the first "in-depth" contemporary exploration of the complexities of reading, writing, rewriting, speaking, aurality, and orality. Fourth, developing Vico's earlier insights and anticipating Kenneth Burke, he sees the importance of the "poetic" as a concept in communication, for the poetic is the means of generating new communicative potentials between medium and message. This provides the poetic, the arts, and other modes of cultural production with a crucial role in a semiotic ecology of communication, an ecology of sense, and making sense. Fifth, in the creative project of this practice, Joyce develops one of the most complex discussions of the contemporary transformation of our media of communication. And finally, his own work is itself an exemplum of the socio-ecological role of the poetic in human communication. VR or cyberspace, as an assemblage of a multiplicity of existing and new media, dramatizes the relativity of our classifications of media and their effects. The newly evolving global metropolis arising in the age of cyberspace is a site where people are intellectual nomads: differentiation, difference, and decentering characterize its structure. Joyce and the arts of high modernism and postmodernism provide a solid appreciation of how people constantly reconstruct or remake reality through the traversing of the multi-sensory fragments of a "virtual world" and of the tremendous powers with which electricity and the analysis of mechanization would endow the paramedia that would eventually emerge. -> WHEN FATHER CROSSED THE LINE by G. L. Eikenberry It was raining. There was no other reason a twelve year old would hang around the house after lunch in the middle of July. The summer holiday had not yet gone stale. I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to convince myself I was more interested in a new model kit than trying to talk mother into letting me go to Al's to play football in his basement when Father threw open the back door and hit the kitchen like a tidal wave. It was just barely two o'clock. I couldn't think what might bring him home from work so early, especially in the middle of the week. "Michael, you're home. Good. Where's your sister?" He always talked like that when he was in one of his moods - - his jaw clenched, the muscles popping out below his temples, the furrows in his forehead deep enough to stick pennies in. I never knew anybody else that could yell as loud as he could, hardly opening his mouth. "I think she's at Valerie's." "Go get her. I want everyone here in half an hour. We're going on a trip." "A trip? Today? I was just starting a new model." It seemed a little too strange to get excited over. "No lip. Just move. Is your mother upstairs?" He didn't wait for an answer. "And tell that sister of yours no dawdling. Understand?" "Yes sir." I really beat it down to Valerie's and got back as fast as I could. Becky promised she'd be home as soon as she helped Valerie put things away. As I opened the back door I could hear Mother and Father upstairs. Their voices were loud. I was glad Becky wasn't back yet. I didn't think a seven year old should hear her such yelling. I was quiet so they wouldn't know I was back. Mother's voice was shrill, almost brittle, "I just don't understand why it has to be so soon. Why does it have to be this very day?" "When the Lord speaks, his servants act. They don't say, 'Give me a couple of days to sort things out,' They obey. I'm going down to the church. I expect you and the children to be packed and ready to go by the time I get back. Remember, we'll be needing warm clothes where we're going. Pack a supper. We'll be driving straight through." "Do you mind telling me where the Lord's supposed to be sending us that we'll need warm clothes in July?" "'Supposed to?'" He made a sound like some kind of animal. I heard it when he hit her. It scared me. I could only remember one other time when he had hit her. That was when she borrowed from the mission money to buy Becky's new Easter shoes on the last day of a sale. It didn't seem right that God always seemed to fit into the picture when he hit her. "I'll hear no more of your blasphemy. I'll be back before five. Be ready." I heard him on the stairs. I scrambled back out the door so I could pretend I was just coming in. "What took you so long? And where's your sister?" "I -- she --" "Never mind the excuses. Just get upstairs and help your mother. We leave as soon as I get back from church -- before supper. Your mother will pack some sandwiches for the car." The door slammed behind him. # # Nobody spoke. There was only the thrumming of the tires and the chattering of the valves in the rattly old Ford. Even Becky was quiet, and Becky was one of those kids that never stopped talking. At first I tried to ask questions like where were we going and when would we be back. I complained a little about not having any time to tell my friends. I knew that Father's sudden journey would pretty well wreck any chance I had of getting in with Al's crowd. You can't just disappear in the middle of summer without people thinking you're weird. I probably said a lot more than I usually would have because he was driving and he couldn't hit me. I was sitting on the other side of the car behind Mother. The only way he could get at me was by thundering away like he used to when I was little and he was afraid to hit me. That was before he quit drinking and got religious. If he came home drunk and forgot I was too little to hit I had to hide back in under the sink where he couldn't get at me. I could stay there for a long time. Then he'd boom at me with that big voice, cursing and saying nasty things. After he started going to church the words changed, but not much else did. "Michael, you will learn that there are some things a child does not question. There are some things that even a man does not question. Do you think the Lord gives a -- fig -- about how you get on with that those brats you idolize? You must put aside such things and embrace His Greater Purpose." "Yeah, well, okay, but --" "No buts. And don't get smug over there. I can stop this car and thrash you if I have to. Now be quiet and pray. Pray for the Lord's guidance, for His help to see beyond your petty, childish concerns. Pray that He will show you where you fit in His Plan." When he started in with the praying business I knew I was on the verge of going too far. I knew better than to get him too stirred up, even if he couldn't get at me right away. I shut up and sulked. Mother tried to reassure us as she passed out the sandwiches and carrot sticks, almost whispering vague assurances that things would be all right. That's when the car started to fill up with that thick, syrupy feeling that made everybody feel numb and not say anything. We didn't even have books. Usually when we travelled we had new books or something. There was nothing to do but read road signs. I tried to sleep, but I couldn't. The old car stink and the stickiness of the vinyl upholstery on my cheek wouldn't let me forget that I was in a lousy situation headed for something that was bound to be worse. When we crossed the line into Quebec, somehow, the way Father always talked, I expected everything to be different, but nothing changed. There wasn't even a line, just a sign. We were supposed to be going some place cold, but I couldn't figure out where. I wondered about places like the Yukon or the Northwest Territories -- some place like that wouldn't be so bad, but it couldn't be any place good like that. Even if we did go some place neat, he'd find a way to make it turn out bad. I wanted to be excited, but I couldn't. Everybody would just think I was on some kind of weird missionary trip with my weird father, Crazy Old Walter Cleary -- off on another God binge. That's the way they talked about Father. I heard them once in the barber shop when nobody in the back room, where Mr. Collins kept the rum and the poker deck knew I was there. I tried counting trees for a while -- not all the trees, just hardwoods bigger around than me. Then it got too for that. There was nothing left but thinking. I hated thinking at times like that. He told me to pray, but how was I supposed to pray? If I prayed the things I was thinking, the Lord would strike me dead. I hated anyone -- anything -- that would do rip me right out of the middle of the summer. Deep down, I didn't really believe God had anything to do with it. I had even thought about running away instead of getting into the car but I didn't dare. God's wrath was terrifying. Father's wrath was worse. # # It was dark -- like hiding in the hall closet, wrapped up in Grandpa's big black coat when I was six. We were almost the only car on the road. I had been sleeping. Father was still driving, his hands clamped to the top of the steering wheel, monster movie greenish from the glow of the dashboard lights. I wondered what time it was. I wondered where we were -- but not enough to shift around so I could look out the window. "Today we cross over the line into a new life. We re-dedicate our lives into the service of the Lord. Right now we're driving through Quebec. Tonight we sleep in the car. Tomorrow the car will be loaded onto a train and carried, with us, into Labrador. Then we'll drive over long, rugged roads eventually to come to a place where I was stationed during the war." No one had asked him anything. He just boomed out his revelation without warning. Becky woke up with a start and just about jumped out of her skin. I wanted to ask why the Lord couldn't think of someplace better than some hole at the end of the world where Father happened to have been during the war, but I knew enough to strike the question down before it ever crossed my lips. I had learned the habit of guilt quite well. I was agonizing over my doubt and my unspoken blasphemy when the flashing lights appeared in the rear window. At first Father seemed to accelerate -- not abruptly -- not enough to worry us. Then he eased off and brought the car slowly over to the shoulder. He was out of the car quickly. I heard Father say "I trust we can do this in your vehicle, officer. There's no reason for them to hear." That was it. At first I didn't catch on that Father was in really serious trouble. He had gotten speeding tickets before. But we sat there for a long time -- long enough for me to give up counting how many times the light on the R.C.M.P. car went around. Mother was trying not to let on that she was crying. She never cried over speeding tickets. When they moved Father to the back seat of the police car it finally began to dawn on me that God was off the hook. None of this had anything to do with God -- or at least, it hadn't been His idea. The rest of the night was a jumble. Mother told us to keep quiet and stay in the car when they came back to talk to her. Then, after a few minutes, the one big R. C. M. Policeman stood outside the car while she got back in and told us that Father would be going with the other "gentleman" while the one waiting by the car drove us to a place where we could spend the night. She said she would call Aunt Jo and Uncle Randy so one of them could come and drive us back home the next day. She didn't actually come out and say it, but I knew Father wouldn't be going with us. I didn't try to explain much to Becky except that we wouldn't be going to Labrador. After that there was a motel where everybody spoke French, and mother was out by the Coke machine for long time talking on a pay phone while Becky cried. It wasn't that she knew what was going on, it was just that everything was strange and she was tired. The only other thing I remember about the motel is that it was cold for July and the heat register smelled like the dust under the dresser in the spare room in Grandma's house. Later, the next day, came the long drive back in Uncle Randy's new red car while Aunt Jo drove Mother in ours. I never saw Father again after that night. Even after he got out of jail, Mother never allowed it. Father had worked in the maintenance department of a hospital. I guess he had been stealing drugs from the pharmacy for a long time. He never denied stealing them, but he claimed his actions were at the bidding of the Lord. He sent the drugs, anonymously, to a Christian mission group. The mission people grew suspicious of the unsolicited drugs that rarely matched their needs, and reported them to the police. I don't know how Father found out that they were on to him, but something happened make up his mind that the time had come to answer God's call in person and in a hurry. Of course I didn't know any of this at the time. I learned more than I'd like to admit -- some of it true and some of it pretty far fetched -- from the other kids over the next few weeks. Their mothers weren't censoring the news the way mine was. It kind of made me a celebrity for a while. The only thing that almost made me cry was the guilt I felt about not missing him. ______________________ At a nameless bend in the river We don't understand the first thing about most of what goes on around us. The operating system without which the disk drive won't boot. The inner workings of the sewage treatment plant downstream. Currents that lead fish to this reedy spot where we cast our lines from shore. How to cleanse the putrid streams of Eastern Europe. How a dollar is still worth a dollar after all that's gone down. Even this: why at sunset white-tailed deer come down to the river and graze unconcerned at our presence where all the parched afternoon they hid in shadow. The heaviness of flesh and bone we dream of more often than hold, and hold too tight sometimes, not quite believing. You. The simple rise and setting of the sun confound our pretentions. The way we still dial a touch-tone phone, confide our secrets more readily to pollsters than lovers. How we can speak in any voice other than our own. The constitution. How the fish we counted on slip our hooks and glide away into darkness. The red sky is omenless, our string bag empty. White-tailed deer lie panting in a field of clover under skeletal hydro towers. On the far shore throbbing windpipes unnumbered as leaves on the trees sing the only tune they know to the waning light. @ Colin Morton 1994 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- We are always leaving, Sandra and always returning. In a snowbound mountain pass near the great divide I read Cohen In Search of the Millenium and that other Cohen who sang of Montreal streets on his Aegean isle And on the red sands of a island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence I wrote of the joys of picking garbage from the post-war streets of Germany. Self-exiled Joyce established his claim to the streets of Dublin Blind Milton saw in the bright room of a dream his departed wife. And here's a prediction Sandra one snowy day before long you will look out on ice-bound Northumberland Strait and see this room in Ottawa all our faces around you and though you may write of Tierra del Fuego or Neptune or the dialogue of particle and wave we will see ourselves too reflected in your lines and thinking of you or dawn on the picket line or guitars in the desert we each will take up a pen and begin to write. @ Colin Morton 1994 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Woman on Her Way to Market No matter what negotiators said It cost her life to walk across a street - A sniper put a bullet through her head. She began to cross then crossed herself instead. An inky pool of blood grew around her feet No matter what negotiators said Around a table with the best intent. She wondered what to give her family to eat Then a sniper put a bullet through her head. Shots flew over her where she lay and bled Her last words out into the empty street. No matter what negotiators said. No time was given to remove the dead. None claim victory, none admit defeat. A sniper put a bullet through her head Then went home to supper, children, wife and bed To lose her memory in a sound night's sleep. No matter what negotiators said A sniper put a bullet through her head. @ Colin Morton 1994 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY: JAMES JOYCE AND THE PRE-HISTORY OF CYBERSPACE by DONALD F. THEALL University Professor Trent University Copyright (c) 1992 by Donald F. Theall all rights reserved. Reprinted from: _Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.3 (May, 1992) **************************** _The Gutenberg Galaxy_, a book which redirected the way that artists, critics, scholars and communicators viewed the role of technological mediation in communication and expression, had its origin in Marshall McLuhan's desire to write a book called "The Road to _Finnegans Wake_." It has not been widely recognized just how important James Joyce's major writings were to McLuhan, or to other major figures (such as Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Lacan) who have written about aspects of communication involving technological mediation, speech, writing, and electronics. While all of these connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic Joycean of them all, McLuhan, provides the most specific bridge linking the work of Joyce and his modernist contemporaries to the development of electric communication and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual reality. McLuhan's scouting of "the Road to _Finnegans Wake_" established him as the first major disseminator of those Joycean insights which have become the unacknowledged basis for our thinking about technoculture, just as the pervasive McLuhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an unconscious one, of our verbal heritage. In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the development of electromechanical communications, telematics and virtual reality. Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data: All the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to the particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.^1^ This "consensual hallucination" produced by "data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system" creates an "unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding."^2^ Almost a decade earlier, McLuhan's remarks about computers (dating from the late 70s) display some striking similarities:^3^ It steps up the velocity of logical sequential calculations to the speed of light reducing numbers to body count by touch . . . . It brings back the Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that "numbers are all"; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy in favor of decentralization. When applied to new forms of electronic-messaging such as teletext and videotext, it quickly converts sequential alphanumeric texts into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging ideographic summation, like hieroglyphs.^4^ McLuhan's "hieroglyphs" certainly more than anticipate Gibson's "iconics" and McLuhan's particular use of hieroglyph or iconology, like that of mosaic, primarily derives from Joyce and Giambattista Vico. It is not surprising then that McLuhan's works, side by side with those of Gibson, have been avidly read by early researchers in MIT's Media Lab^5^, for these researchers also conceive of a VR composed, like the tribal and collective "global village," of "tactile, haptic, proprioceptive and acoustic spaces and involvements."^6^ The experiments of the artistic avant-garde movements (such as the Dadaists, the Bauhaus and the Surrealists) and of individuals (such as Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Sergei Eisenstein or Luis Bunuel) generated the exploration of the semiotics and technical effects of such spaces and involvements. Duchamp, for example, became an early leading figure in splitting apart the presumed generic boundaries of painting and sculpture to explore arts of motion, light, movement, gesture, and concept, exemplified in his _Large Glass_^7^ and the serial publication of his accompanying notes from _The Box of 1914_ through _The Green Box_ to _A l'infinitif_. His interest in the notes as part of the total work echo Joyce's own interest in the publication of _Work in Progress_ and commentaries he organized upon it (e.g., _Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress_). Joyce also explores similar aspects of motion, light, movement, gesture and concept. So the road to VR and MIT's Media Lab begins with poetic and artistic experimentation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; later, as Stuart Brand notes, many of the Media Lab researchers of the 60s and 70s placed great importance on collaboration with artists involved in exploring the nature and art of motion and in investigating new relationships between sight, hearing, and the other senses.^8^ Understanding the social and cultural implications of VR and cyberspace requires a radical reassessment of the inter-relationships between Gibson's now commonplace description of cyberspace, McLuhan's modernist-influenced vision of the development of electric media, and the particular impact that Joyce had both on McLuhan's writings about electrically mediated communication and on the views of Borges, Cage, Derrida, Eco and Lacan regarding problems of mediation and communication. Such a reassessment requires that two central issues be discussed: (i) the crucial nature of VR's challenge to the privileging of language through the orality/literacy dichotomization used by many theorists of language and communication; (ii) the idea of VR's presence as *the* super-medium that encompasses and transcends all media. The cluster of critics who have addressed orality and literacy, following the lead of Walter Ong, H.A. Innis and Eric Havelock, have--like them--failed to comprehend the fact that McLuhan was disseminating a Joycean view which grounded communication in tactility, gesture and CNS processes, rather than promulgating the emergence of a new oral/aural age, a secondary orality. This emphasis on the tactile, the gestural and the play of the CNS in communication is a key to Joyce's literary exploration of a theme he shared with his radical modernist colleagues in other arts who envisioned the eventual development of a coenaesthetic medium^9^ that would integrate and harmonize the effects of sensory and neurological information in currently existing and newly emerging art forms. Joyce's work should be recognized as pioneering the artistic exploration of two sets of differences-- orality/literacy and print/[tele-]electric media--that have since become dominant themes in the discussion of these questions. _Finnegans Wake_ is one of the first major poetic encounters with the challenge that electronic media present to the traditionally accepted relationships between speech, script and print. (_Ulysses_ also involves such an encounter, but at an earlier stage in the historic development of mediated communication.) Imagine Joyce around 1930 asking the question: what is the role of the book in a culture which has discovered photography, phonography, radio, film, television, telegraph, cable, and telephone and has developed newspapers, magazines, advertising, Hollywood, and sales promotion? What people once read, they will now go to see in film and on television; everyday life will appear in greater detail and more up-to-date fashion in the press, on radio and in television; oral poetry will be reanimated by the potentialities of sound recording.^10^ -> BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY ********************************** The "counter-poetic," _Finnegans Wake_, provides one of *the* key texts regarding the problem presented by the dichotomization of the oral and the written and by its frequent corollary, a privileging of either speech or language. This enigmatic work is not only a polysemic, encyclopedic book designed to be read with the simultaneous involvement of ear and eye: it is also a self-reflexive book about the role of the book in the electro-machinic world of the new technology.^11^ The _Wake_ is the most comprehensive exploration, prior to the 1960s or 70s, of the ways in which these new modes created a dramatic crisis for the arts of language and the privileged position of the printed book. The _Wake_ dramatizes the necessary deconstruction and reconstruction of language in a world where multi-semic grammars and rhetorics, combined with entirely new modes for organizing and transmitting information and knowledge, eventually would impose a variety of new, highly specialized roles on speech, print and writing. Joyce's selection of Vico's _New Science_^12^ as the structural scaffolding for the _Wake_--the equivalent of Homer's _Odyssey_ in _Ulysses_--underscores how his interest in the contemporary transformation of the book requires grounding the evolution of civilization in the poetics of communication, especially gesture and language and the "prophetic" role of the poetic in shaping the future. As the world awakens to the full potentialities for the construction of artifacts and processes of communication in the new electric cosmos, Joyce foresees the transformation (not the death) of the book--going beyond the book as it had historically evolved. Confronted with this situation, Joyce seeks to develop a poetic language which will resituate the book within this new communicative cosmos, while simultaneously recognizing the drive toward the development of a theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium, "virtual reality." Since the action takes place in a dreamworld, Joyce can produce an impressively prophetic imaginary prototype for the virtual worlds of the future. His dreamworld envelops the reader within an aural sphere, accompanied by kinetic and gestural components that arise from effects of rhythm and intonation realized through the visual act of reading; but it also reproduces imaginarily the most complex multi-media forms and envisions how they will utilize his present, which will have become the past, to transform the future.^13^ The hero(ine)^14^ in the _Wake_, "Here Comes Everybody," is a communicating machine, "This harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole)" (310.1), an electric transmission-receiver system, an ear, the human sensorium, a presence "eclectrically filtered for all irish earths and ohmes." Joyce envisions the person as embodied within an electro-machinopolis (an electric, pan-global, machinic environment), which becomes an extension of the human body, an interior presence, indicated by a stress on the playfulness of the whole person and on tactility as calling attention to the interplay of sensory information within the electro-chemical neurological system. This medley of elements and concerns, focussed on questioning the place of oral and written language in an electro-mechanical technoculture that engenders more and more comprehensive modes of communication biased towards the dramatic, marks Joyce as a key figure in the pre-history of virtual reality. Acutely sensitive to the inseparable involvement of speech, script, and print with the visual, the auditory, the kinesthetic and other modes of expression, Joyce roots all communication in gesture: "In the beginning was the gest he jousstly says" (468.5-6). Here the originary nature of gesture (gest, F. geste = gesture)^15^ is linked with the mechanics of humor (i.e., jest) and to telling a tale (gest as a feat and a tale or romance). Gestures, like signals and flashing lights that provide elementary mechanical systems for communications, are "words of silent power" (345.19). A traffic crossing sign, "Belisha beacon, beckon bright" (267.12), exemplifies such situations "Where flash becomes word and silents selfloud." Since gestures, and ultimately all acts of communication, are generated from the body, the "gest" as "flesh without word" (468.5-6) is "a flash" that becomes word and "communicake[s] with the original sinse" [originary sense + the temporal, "since" + original sin (239.1)]. "Communicake" parallels eating to speaking, and speaking is linked in turn to the act of communion as participation in, and consumption of, the Word--an observation adumbrated in the title of one of Marcel Jousse's groundbreaking books on gesture as the origin of language, _La Manducation de la Parole_ ("The Mastication of the Word"). By treating the "gest" as a bit (a bite), orality and the written word as projections of gesture can be seen to spring from the body as a communicating machine.^16^ The historical processes that contribute to the development of cyberspace augment the growing emphasis, in theories such as Kenneth Burke's, on the idea that the goal of the symbolic action called communication is *secular, paramodern communion*.^17^ The _Wake_ provides a self-reflexive explanation of the communicative process of encoding and decoding required to interpret an encoded text, which itself is characteristically mechanical: The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let me take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman's tale posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas. (482.31-483.4) The dreamer as a poet, a Hermetic thief, an "outlex" (169.3)--i.e., an outlaw, lawless, beyond the word and, therefore, the law, "invents" the writing by originally discovering the reading of the book and does so by "raiding" [i.e., "plundering" (reading + raiding)].^18^ This reading encompasses both the idealistic "eschatology" and the excrementitious-materialistic (pun on scatology) within the designing of this "book of kills" (deaths, deletions, drinking sessions, flows of water--a counterpoint of continuity and discontinuity),^19^ a book as carefully crafted or machined as the illuminations of the _Book of Kells_ are. Seeing and hearing are intricately involved in this process, so the reader of this night-book also becomes a "raider" of the original "reading-writing" through the machinery of writing. It is a production "in soandso many counterpoint words" that can be read only through the machinery of decoding, for "What can't be coded can be decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for" (482.34). The tale that the pen writes is transmitted by the post, and the whole process of communication and its interpretation is an extension of the hand and of bodily gesture-language: "The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas" (483.3-4).[11] Orality, particularly song, is grounded in the machinery of the body's organs: "Singalingalying. Storiella as she is syung. Whence followeup with endspeaking nots for yestures" (267.7-9).^20^ The link is rhythm, for "Soonjemmijohns will cudgel some a rhythmatick or other over Browne and Nolan's divisional tables" (268.7-9). Gesture, with its affiliation with all of the neuro-muscular movements of the body, is a natural script or originary writing, for the word "has been reconstricted out of oral style into verbal for all time with ritual rhythmics" (36.8-9). Since the oral is "reconstricted" (reconstructed + constricted or limited) into the verbal, words also are crafted in relation to sound, a natural development of which is "wordcraft": for example, hieroglyphs and primitive script based on drawings or mnemonic devices.^21^ Runes and ogham are literally "woodwordings," so pre- or proto-writing (i.e., syllabic writing) is already "a mechanization of the word," which is itself implicit in the body's use of gesture. Joyce's practice and his theoretical orientation imply that as the road to cyberspace unfolds, the very nature of the word, the image, and the icon also changes. Under the impact of electric communication, it is once again clear that the concept of the word must embrace artifacts and events as well.^22^ Writing and speech are subsumed into entirely new relationships with non-phonemic sound, image, gesture, movement, rhythm, and all modes of sensory input, especially the tactile. To continue to speak about a dichotomy of orality versus literacy is a misleading over-simplification of the role that electric media play in this transformation, a role best comprehended through historical knowledge of the earliest stages of human communication where objects, gestures and movements apparently intermingled with verbal and non-verbal sounds. Marschak's study of early cultural artifacts, the Aschers' discussion of the quipu, and Levi-Strauss's discussions of the kinship system demonstrate the relative complexity of some ancient, non-linguistic systems of communication.^23^ Adapting Vico's speculation that human communication begins with the gestures and material symbols of the "mute," Joyce early in the _Wake_ presents an encounter between two characters whose names deliberately echo Mutt and Jeff of comic strip fame. Mutt (until recently a mute) and Jute (a nomadic invader) "excheck a few strong verbs weak oach eather" (16.8-9). Beginning with gesture, hieroglyph and rune, Joyce traces human communication through its complex, labyrinthine development, right down to the TV and what it bodes for the future. For example, an entire episode of the _Wake_ (I,5)^24^ is devoted to the technology of manuscripts and the theory of their interpretation--textual hermeneutics--in which the _Wake_ as a book is interpreted as if it were a manuscript, "the proteiform graph is a polyhedron of all scripture" (107.8). At each stage, Joyce recognizes how the machinery of codification is implicit in the history of communication, for discussing this manuscript, he observes that on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world's oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced but not punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. . . . (123.34-124.3) This illustrates how the beginning of electric media (the telegraph) is a transformation of the potentialities of the early manuscript, just as any manuscript is a transformation of the "wordcraft" of "woodwordings." "Morse code" is indicative of the mechanics of codification, for while code is essential to all communication (thus prior to the moment when the mechanical is electrified), the role of codification is radically transformed by mechanization. The appearance of the printing press demonstrates the effect of this radical transformation: Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined . . . . (20.7-16) As "Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and great primer" steps "rubrickredd out of the wordpress," the dream reminds us that "papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints." Topics (L. topos) and types (L. typus) as figures, forms, images, topics and commonplaces, the elemental bits of writing and rhetoric, are now realized through typesetting. Implicit in the technology of print is the complex intertextuality of verbal ambivalence, for "every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined." Printing sets in place the "root language" (424.17) residing in the types and topes of the world and potentially eliminates a multitude of alternate codes such as actual sounds, visual images, real objects, movements, and gestures that will re-emerge with the electromechanical march towards VR and cyberspace. By the 1930s, in a pub scene in the _Wake_, Joyce playfully anticipated how central sporting events or political debates would be for television when he described the TV projection of a fight being viewed by the pub's "regulars" (possibly the first fictional TV bar room scene in literary history). Joyce's presentation of this image of the battle of Butt and Taff, which is peppered with complex puns involving terminology associated with the technical details of TV transmission, has its own metamorphic quality, underscored by the "viseversion" (vice versa imaging) of Butt and Taff's images on "the bairdboard bombardment screen" ("bairdboard" because John Logie Baird developed TV in 1925). Joyce explains how "the bairdboard bombardment screen," the TV as receiver, receives the composite video signal "in scynopanc pulses" (the synchronization pulses that form part of the composite video signal), that come down the "photoslope" on the "carnier walve" (i.e., the carrier wave which carries the composite video signal) "with the bitts bugtwug their teffs." Joyce imagines this receiver to be a "light barricade" against which the charge of the light brigade (the video signal) is directed, reproducing the "bitts." Although (at least to my knowledge) bit was not used as a technical term in communication technology at the time, Joyce is still able, on analogy with the telegraph, to think of the electrons or photons as bits of information creating the TV picture. Speech, print and writing are interwoven with electromechanical technologies of communication throughout the _Wake_. References to the manufacture of books, newspapers and other products of the printing press abound. Machineries and technological organizations accompany this development: reporters, editors, interviewers, newsboys, ad men who produce "Abortisements" (181.33). Since complex communication technology is characteristic of the later stages, in addition to newspapers, radio, "dupenny" magazines, comics (contemporary cave drawing), there is "a phantom city phaked by philm pholk," by those who would "roll away the reel world." Telecommunications materialize again and again throughout the night of the _Wake_, where "television kills telephony." The "tele-" prefix, betraying an element of futurology in the dream, appears in well over a dozen words including in addition to the familiar forms terms such as "teleframe," "telekinesis," "telesmell," "telesphorously," "televisible," "televox," or "telewisher," while familiar forms also appear in a variety of transformed "messes of mottage," such as "velivision" and "dullaphone." This complex verbal play all hinges on the inter-translatability of the emerging forms of technologically mediated communication. In the opening episode of the second part, the "Feenicht's Playhouse," an imaginary play produced by HCE's children in their nursery is "wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. In four tubbloids" (219.28-9). Like the cinema, "wordloosed" (wirelessed but also let loose) transglobally, all such media are engaged in a "crowdblast" of existing languages and cultures, producing an interplay between local cultures and a pan-international hyperculture. In the concluding moments of the _Wake_, Joyce generalizes his pre-cybernetic vision in one long intricate performance that not only concerns the book itself, but also anticipates by twenty years some major discussions of culture, communication, and technology. A brief scene setting: this is the moment in the closing episode just as the HCE is awakening. In the background he hears noises from the machines in the laundry next door. It is breakfast time and there are sounds of food being prepared; eggs are being cooked and will be eaten, so there is anticipation of the process of digestion that is about to take place.^25^ At this moment a key passage, inviting interminable interpretation, presents in very abstract language a generalized model of production and consumption, which is also the recorso of the schema of this nocturnal poem, that consumes and produces, just as the digestive system itself digests and produces new cells and excrement--how else could one be a poet of "litters" as well as letters and be "litterery" (114.17; 422.35) as well as literary? The passage begins by speaking about "our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon," which may be the book, a letter to be written, the digestive system assimilating the eggs, the sexual process, the mechanical "mannormillor clipperclappers" (614.13) of the nearby Mannor Millor laundry, the temporal movement of history, or a theory of engineering, for essentially it relates the production of cultural artifacts or the consumption of matter (like reading a book, seeing a film or eating eggs; the text mentions a "farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial, and hatch-as-hatch-can" (614.28)). The passage concludes, "as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there's scribings scrawled on eggs" (615.9-10). Here the frequent pairing of speaking (writing) with eating is brought to a climax in which it is related to all the abstract machines which shape the life of nature, decomposing into "bits" and recombining. These bits, described as "the dialytically [dialectic + dialysis] separated elements of precedent decomposition," may be eggs, or other "homely codes" such as the "heroticisms, catastrophes and ec-centricities" (the stuff of history or the dreamers stuttering speech or his staggering movements) transmitted elementally, "type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, sendence of sundance . . ." (614.33-615.2). All of these bits--matter, eggs, words, TV signals, concepts, what you will--are "anastomosically assimilated and preteri-dentified paraidiotically," producing "the sameold gamebold adomic structure . . . as highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it" (615.5-8). In anticipation of the contemporary electronic definition of the "bit," Joyce associates the structure of communication (ranging from TV and telegraphic signals to morphophonemic information and kinesthesia) with bits of signals, "data" and information. He presents it as essentially an assemblage of multiplicities, different from a synthesizing or totalizing moment, for it occurs by the crossing of pluralistic branches of differing motifs, through a process of transmission involving flows, particularly the flowing of blood, water and speech, and breaks such as the discontinuous charges of electrical energy, telegraphy, and punctuation--those "endspeaking nots for yestures" (267.8). -> BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY ********************************** Here Joyce's entire prophetic, schizoid vision of cyberspace seems somewhat Deleuzian. It is an ambivalent and critical vision, for the "ambiviolence" of the "langdwage" throughout the _Wake_ implies critique as it unfolds this history, since Joyce still situates parody within satire. He does not free it from socio-political reference, as a free-floating "postmodernist" play with the surface of signifiers would. This can be noted in the way that Joyce first probes what came to be one of the keystones of McLuhanism. Joyce plays throughout the work with spheres and circles, some of which parody one of the mystical definitions of God frequently attributed to Alan of Lille (Alanus de Insulis), but sometimes referred to as Pascal's sphere. Speaking of a daughter-goddess figure, he says: our Frivulteeny Sexuagesima to expense herselfs as sphere as possible, paradismic perimutter, in all directions on the bend of the unbridalled, the infinisissimalls of her facets becoming manier and manier as the calicolum of her umdescribables (one has thoughts of that eternal Rome) . . . . (298.27-33) Here a sphere is imagined whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, since it is infinitesimal and undescribable (though apparently the paradigmic perimeter is sexual), as the paradisal mother communicates herself without apparent limit. This is both an embodied and a disembodied sphere, polarizing and decentering the image so as to impede any closure. The same spherical principle is applied more widely to the presentation of the sense of hearing. The reception of messages by the hero/ine of the _Wake_, "(Hear! Calls! Everywhair!)" (108.23), is accomplished by "bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd" (309.22-4), a sphere for it requires "a gain control of circumcentric megacycles" (310.7-8). It can truly be said of HCE, "Ear! Ear! Weakear! An allness eversides!" (568.26),^26^ precisely because he is "human, erring and condonable"(58.19), yet "humile, commune and ensectuous" (29.30), suffering many deprivations his "hardest crux ever" (623.33) [italics mine]. Though "humbly to fall and cheaply to rise, [this] exposition of failures" (589.17) living with "Heinz cans everywhere"(581.5), still protests his fate "making use of sacrilegious languages to the defect that he would challenge their hemosphores to exterminate them" (81.25) by decentering or dislocating any attempts to enclose him. This discussion of sphere and hearing critically anticipates what McLuhan later called "acoustic space"--a fundamental cyberspatial conception with its creation of multi-dimensional environments, a spherical environment within which aural information is received by the CNS--that also embodies a transformation of the hermetic poetic insight that "the universe (or nature) [or in earlier versions, God] is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere."^27^ Today, VR, as Borges' treatment of Pascal's sphere seems to imply, is coming to be our contemporary pre-millennial epitome of this symbol, a place where each participant (rather than *the* deity), as microcosm, is potentially the enigmatic center. People englobed within virtual worlds find themselves interacting within complex, transverse, intertextual multimedia forms that are interlinked globally through complex, rhizomic (root-like) networks. All of this must necessarily relate back to the way Joyce treats the subject of and produces the artifact that is *the book*. While, beginning with Mallarme, the themes of the book and the death of literature resound through modernism, Joyce's transformation of the book filtered through the "mcluhanitic" reaction to "mcluhanism" becomes, in the usual interpretation of McLuhan, the annunciation of the death of the book, *not* its transformation, as with Joyce. Joyce is important, for following Marcel Jousse and Vico,^28^ he situates speech and writing as modes of communication within a far richer and more complex bodily and gestural theory of communication than that represented by the reductive dichotomy of the oral and the literate. As the predominance of print declines, the _Wake_ explores the history of communication by comically assimilating the method of Vico's _The New Science_--which, as one of the first systematic and empirical studies of the place of poetic action in the history of how people develop systems of signs and symbols, attributes people's ability for constructing their society to the poetic function. Joyce avoids that facile over-simplification of the complexities of print, arising from the orality/literacy dichotomy, which attributes a privileged role to language as verbal--a privilege based on theological and metaphysical claims. The same dichotomy creates problems in discussing technological and other non-verbal forms of mediated communication, including VR and TV. At one point in the _Wake_ "Television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!" (52.18-9), for TV also comprehends the visual and the kinesthetic. Yet most McLuhanites who have opted for the orality/literacy split still call it an oral medium in opposition to print. The same problem occurs when mime, with its dependence on gesture and rhythm, is analyzed as an oral medium. As the _Wake_ jocularly observes: seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the cheerio, he aptly sketched for our soontobe second parents . . . the touching seene. The solence of that stilling! Here one might a fin fell. Boomster rombombonant! It scenes like a landescape from Wildu Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb as Mum's mutyness, this mimage . . . is odable to os across the wineless Ere no dor nor mere eerie nor liss potent of suggestion than in the tales of the tingmount. (52.34-53.6) The mime plays with silence, sight, touch and movement seeming like a landscape or a movie. Facile over-simplification also overlooks that long before the beginnings of the trend towards cyberspace, print had not been strictly oriented towards linearity and writing, for the print medium was supplemented by its encyclopedic, multi-media nature, absorbing other media such as illustrations, charts, graphs, maps, diagrams, and tables, not all aspects of which are precisely linear. While writing may have had a predominantly linear tendency, its history is far more complex, as Elizabeth Eisenstein has established.^29^ The orality/literacy distinction does not provide an adequately rich concept for dealing with print, any more than it does for the most complex and comprehensive images of virtual reality and participatory hyperspace (e.g., sophisticated extensions of the datagloves or the Aspen map), which, to adapt a Joycean phrase, directly transmit "feelful thinkamalinks." Since VR should enable a person to feel the bodily set of another person or place, while simultaneously receiving multiple intersensory messages, understanding the role of the body in communication is crucial for understanding VR. When McLuhan and Edward Carpenter first spoke about their concept of orality (linked to aurality, mouth to ear, as line of print to eye scan), it entailed recognizing the priority and primacy of tactility and inter-sensory activity in communication, for "In the beginning there was the gest." As Kenneth Burke realized in the 30s, Joyce's grounding communication and language in gesture is distinctly different from an approach which privileges language, for it involves a complete embodying of communication. While the oral only embodies the speech organs, the entire CNS is necessarily involved in all communication, including speech. As John Bishop has shown in _Joyce's Book of the Dark_, the sleeper primarily receives sensations with his ear, but these are tranformed within the body into the world of signs that permeate the dream and which constitute the _Wake_.^30^ Joyce views language as "gest," as an imaginary means of embodying intellectual-emotional complexes, his "feelful thinkamalinks." From this perspective, the semic units of the _Wake_ (integrated complexes constructed from the interaction of speech and print involving, rhythm, orthography as sign and gesture and visual image) assume the role of dialogue with other modes of mediated communication, exploiting their limitations and differences. Joyce crafts a new lingua for a world where the poetic book will deal with those aspects of the imaginary that cannot be encompassed within technologically mediated communication. Simultaneously, he recognizes that a trend towards virtual reality is characteristic of the electro-mechanically or technologically mediated modes of communication. This process posits a continuous dialogue in which _Ulysses_ and the _Wake_ were designed to play key roles. As Joyce--who quipped that "some of the means I use are trivial--and some are quadrivial"^31^--was aware, ancient rhetorical theory (which he parodied both in the Aeolus episode of _Ulysses_ and in the "Triv and Quad" section (II, 2) of the _Wake_) also included those interactive contexts where the body was an intrinsic part of communication. Delivery involved controlling the body, and the context within which it was presented, as well as the voice. The actual rhetorical action (particularly in judicial oratory) also frequently involved demonstration and witnesses. This analysis, closer to the pre-literate, recognized the way actual communication integrated oral, visual, rhythmical, gestural and kinesthetic components. Recent research into the classical and medieval "arts of memory," inspired by Frances Yates,^32^ have demonstrated that memory involves the body, a sense of the dramatic and theatrical, visual icons and movement, as well as the associative power of the oral itself. Joyce playfully invokes this memory system familiar to him from his Jesuit education: "After sound, light and heat, memory, will and understanding. Here (the memories framed from walls are minding) till wranglers for wringwrowdy wready are . . ." (266.18-22). A classical world, which recognized such features of the communicative process, could readily speak about the poem as a "speaking picture" and the painting as "silent poetry." Here, there is an inclusiveness of the means available rather than a dependency on a single channel of communication. Joyce was so intrigued by the potentials of the new culture of time and space for reconstructing and revolutionizing the book that he claimed himself to be "the greatest engineer," as well as a Renaissance man, who was also a "musicmaker, a philosophist and heaps of other things."^33^ The mosaic of the _Wake_ contributes to understanding the nature of cyberspace by grasping the radical constitution of the electronic cosmos that Joyce called "the chaosmos of Alle" (118.21). In this "chaosmos," engineered by a sense of interactive mnemotechnics, he intuits the relation between a nearly infinite quantity of cultural information and the mechanical yet rhizomic organization of a network, "the matrix," which underlies the construction of imaginary and virtual worlds. One crucial reason for raising the historic image of Joyce in a discussion of cyberspace is that he carries out one of the most comprehensive contemporary discussions of virtual recollection (a concept first articulated by Henri Bergson as virtual memory).^34^ In counterpoint to the emerging technological capability to create the "virtual reality" of cyberspace, Joyce turned to dream and hallucination for the creation of virtual worlds within natural language. That tactile, gestural-based dreamworld has built-in mnemonic systems: A scene at sight. Or dreamoneire. Which they shall memorise. By her freewritten. Hopely for ear that annalykeses if scares for eye that sumns. Is it in the now woodwordings of our sweet plantation where the branchings then will singingsing tomorrows gone and yesters outcome . . . . (280.01-07) Joyce's virtual worlds began with the recognition of "everybody" as a poet (each person is co-producer; he quips, "his producers are they not his consumers?"). All culture becomes the panorama of his dream; the purpose of poetic writing in a post-electric world is the painting of that interior (which is not the psychoanalytic, but the social unconscious) and the providing of new language appropriate to perceiving the complexities of the new world of technologically reproducible media: What has gone? How it ends? Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today's truth, tomorrow's trend. (614.19-21) Joyce's text is embodied in gesture, enclosed in words, enmeshed in time, and engaged in foretelling "Today's truth. Tomorrow's trend." The poet reproducing his producers is the divining prophet. If speaking of Joyce and cyberspace seems to imply a kind of futurology, the whole of McLuhan's project was frequently treated as prophesying the emergence of a new tribalized global society--the global village, itself anticipated by Joyce's "international" language of multilingual puns. In fact, in _War and Peace in the Global Village_, McLuhan uses Wakese (mostly from Joyce, freely associated) as marginalia. McLuhan flourished in his role as an international guru by casting himself in the role of "*the* prime prophet" announcing the coming of a new era of communication^35^ (now talked about as virtual reality or cyberspace, though he never actually used that word). The prime source of his "prophecies," which he never concealed, is to be found in Joyce and Vico.^36^ The entire Joycean dream is prophetic or divinatory in part, for the anticipated awakening (Vico's fourth age of ricorso following birth, marriage, and death) is "providential divining": Ere we are! Signifying, if tungs may tolkan, that, primeval conditions having gradually receded but nevertheless the emplacement of solid and fluid having to a great extent persisted through intermittences of sullemn fulminance, sollemn nuptialism, sallemn sepulture and providential divining, making possible and even inevitable, after his a time has a tense haves and havenots hesitency, at the place and period under consideration a socially organic entity of a millenary military maritory monetary morphological circumformation in a more or less settled state of equonomic ecolube equalobe equilab equilibbrium. (599.8-18) Earlier, it is said of the dreamer that "He caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present . . ." (496.34-497.1). Joyce, from whom McLuhan derived the idea, is playing with the medieval concept of natural prophecy, making it a fundamental feature of the epistemology of his dream world, in which the "give and take" of the "mind factory," an "antithesis of ambidual anticipation," generates auspices, auguries, and divination--for "DIVINITY NOT DEITY [is] THE UNCERTAINTY JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE" (282.R7-R13). Natural prophecy, the medieval way of thinking about futurology with which Joyce and McLuhan were naturally familiar from scholasticism and Thomism, occurs through a reading of history and its relation to that virtual, momentary social text (the present), which is dynamic and always undergoing change. Joyce appears to blend this medieval concept with classical sociological ideas--of prophecy as an "intermediation"--quite consistent with his concepts of communication as involving aspects of participation and communion. It is only through some such reading that the future existent in history can be known and come to be. McLuhan's reading, adapted from Joyce, of the collision of history and the present moment led him to foresee a world emerging where communication would be tactile, post-verbal, fully participatory and pan-sensory.^37^ Why ought communication history and theory take account of Joyce's poetic project? First, because he designed a new language (later disseminated by McLuhan, Eco, and Derrida) to carry out an in-depth interpretation of complex socio-historical phenomenon, namely new modes of semiotic production. Two brief examples: Hollywood "wordloosing celluloid soundscript over seven seas," or the products of the Hollywood dream factory itself as "a rolling away of the reel world," reveal media's potential international domination as well as the problems film form raises for the mutual claims of the imaginary and the real. For example, the term "abortisements" (advertisements) suggests the manipulation of fetishized femininity with its submerged relation of advertisement to butchering--the segmentation of the body as object into an assemblage of parts. Second, Joyce's work is a critique of communication's historical role in the production of culture, and it constitutes one of the earliest recognitions of the importance of Vico to a contemporary history of communication and culture.^38^ Third, his work is itself the first "in-depth" contemporary exploration of the complexities of reading, writing, rewriting, speaking, aurality, and orality. Fourth, developing Vico's earlier insights and anticipating Kenneth Burke, he sees the importance of the "poetic" as a concept in communication, for the poetic is the means of generating new communicative potentials between medium and message. This provides the poetic, the arts, and other modes of cultural production with a crucial role in a semiotic ecology of communication, an ecology of sense, and making sense. Fifth, in the creative project of this practice, Joyce develops one of the most complex discussions of the contemporary transformation of our media of communication. And finally, his own work is itself an exemplum of the socio-ecological role of the poetic in human communication. VR or cyberspace, as an assemblage of a multiplicity of existing and new media, dramatizes the relativity of our classifications of media and their effects. The newly evolving global metropolis arising in the age of cyberspace is a site where people are intellectual nomads: differentiation, difference, and decentering characterize its structure. Joyce and the arts of high modernism and postmodernism provide a solid appreciation of how people constantly reconstruct or remake reality through the traversing of the multi-sensory fragments of a "virtual world" and of the tremendous powers with which electricity and the analysis of mechanization would endow the paramedia that would eventually emerge. -> BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY ********************************** NOTES ^1^ William Gibson, _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ (NY: Bantam Paperback, 1989), 16. ^2^ William Gibson, _Neuromancer_ (NY: Ace, 1984), 51. ^3^ This quotation is taken from the posthumously published Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, _The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century_, (NY: Oxford UP, 1989). It was edited and rewritten from McLuhan's working notes, which had to date from the late 70s, since he died in 1981. McLuhan's words were written more than a decade before their posthumous publication in 1989. ^4^ McLuhan (1989), 103. ^5^ Stuart Brand, _The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT_ (NY: Viking, 1987). ^6^ Marshall McLuhan, _The Letters of Marshall McLuhan_, ed. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan and William Toye (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987), 385. ^7^ Craig E. Adcock, _Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis_ (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI, 1983), 28: "The _Large Glass_ is an illuminated manuscript consisting of 476 documents; the illumination consists of almost every work that Duchamp did." ^8^ Stuart Brand (1987). ^9^ A further paper needs to be written on the way in which synaesthesia as well as coenesthesia participate in the pre-history of cyberspace. The unfolding history of poets and artists confronting electromechanical technoculture, which begins in the 1850s, reveals a growing interest in synesthesia and coenesthesia and parallels a gradually accelerating yearning for artistic works which are syntheses or orchestrations of the arts. By 1857 Charles Baudelaire intuited the future transformational power of the coming of electro-communication when he established his concept of synaesthesia and the trend toward a synthesis of all the arts as central aspects of symbolisme. The transformational matrices involved in synaesthesia and the synthesis of the arts unconsciously respond to that digitalization implicit in Morse code and telegraphy, anticipating how one of the major characteristics of cyberspace will be the capability of all modes of expression to be transformed into minimal discrete contrastive units-- bits. This assertion concerning Baudelaire's use of synesthesia is developed from Benjamin's discussions of Baudelaire. The role of shock in Baudelaire's poetry, which links the "Correspondances" with "La Vie Anterieur," also reflects how the modern fragmentation involved in "Le Crepuscle du Soir" and "Le Crepuscle du Matin" is reassembled poetically through the verbal transformation of sensorial modes. This is the beginning of a period in which the strategy of using shock to deal with fragmentation is transformed into seeing the multiplicity of codifications of municipal (or urban) reality. So when the metamorphic sensory effects of nature's temple are applied to the splenetic here and now, in the background is the emergence of the new codifications of reality, such as the photography which so preoccupied Baudelaire, and telegraphy, which had an important impact in his lifetime. ^10^ See D.F. Theall, "The Hieroglyphs of Engined Egypsians: Machines, Media and Modes of Communication in _Finnegans Wake_," _Joyce Studies Annual 1991_, ed. Thomas F. Staley (Austin: Texas UP, 1991), 129-52. This publication provides major source material for the present article. ^11^ "Machinic" is used here very deliberately as distinct from mechanical. See Gilles Deleuze, _Dialogues_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Haberjam (NY: Columbia UP, 1987), 70-1, where he discusses the difference between the machine and the 'machinic' in contradistinction to the mechanical. ^12^ Giambattista Vico, _The New Science_, ed. T.G. Bergen and M. Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1948). ^13^ For fuller discussion of Joyce and these themes see Donald Theall, "James Joyce: Literary Engineer," in _Literature and Ethics: Essays Presented to A.E. Malloch_, ed. Gary Wihl & David Williams (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1988), 111-27; Donald and Joan Theall, "James Joyce and Marshall McLuhan," _Canadian Journal of Communication_, 14:4/5 (Fall 1989), 60-1; and Donald Theall (1991), 129-152. A number of subsequent passages are adapted with minor modifications from parts of the last article, which is a fairly comprehensive coverage of Joyce and technology. ^14^ While in one sense the dreamer is identified as the male HCE, the book opens and closes with the feminine voice of ALP. It is her dream of his dreaming, or his dream of her dreaming? Essentially, it is androgynous, with a mingling of male and female voices throughout. For another treatment of the male-female theme in the _Wake_, see Suzette Henke, _James Joyce and the Politics of Desire_ (NY: RKP, 1989). ^15^ "Jousstly" refers to Marcel Jousse's important work on communication and the semiotics of gesture, with which Joyce was familiar. See especially Lorraine Weir, "The Choreography of Gesture: Marcel Jousse and _Finnegans Wake_," _James Joyce Quarterly_, 14:3 (Spring 1977), 313-25. ^16^ This motif will be developed further below. It relates to Joyce's interest in Lewis Carroll. Gilles Deleuze comments extensively on manducation in _The Logic of Sense_, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (NY: Columbia UP, 1990). ^17^ See Dewey, _Art As Experience_ (NY: G.P. Putnam, 1958) and Kenneth Burke, _Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose_ (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). ^18^ Cf. T.S. Eliot, _Selected Essays_ (NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 182: "One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal . . . "; see also "Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires," ("East Coker," _Four Quartets_, l. 5). Joyce's use of "outlex" relates to Jim the Penman, for Joyce analyzing Shem in the _Wake_ is aware of how the traditions of the artist as liar, counterfeiter, con man, and thief could all coalesce about the role of the artist as an outlaw. ^19^ "Kills" in the sense of "to kill a bottle"; "kills" also as a stream or channel of water. ^20^ See Walter Ong's remarks about Marcel Jousse in _The Presence of the Word_ (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1967), 146-7, and Lorraine Weir's more extensive development of the theme in (1977), 313-325, and in _Writing Joyce: A Semiotics of the Joyce System_ (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1989). ^21^ I.J. Gelb, _A Study of Writing_ (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963). ^22^ Cf. McLuhan (1989), 182. ^23^ Alexander Marschak, _The Roots of Civilization_ (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1982); Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher, _Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, mathematics and Culture_ (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1981); Claude Levi-Strauss, _The Elementary Structures of Kinship_, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, ed. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). ^24^ The usual way to indicate sections of the _Wake_ is by part and episode. Hence I,v is Part I episode 5. There are four parts, the first consisting of eight episodes, the second and the third of four episodes each and the fourth of a single episode. ^25^ Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, _Understanding Finnegans Wake_ (NY: Garland Publishing, 1982), 308-09. ^26^ For detailed discussion of the treatment of the ear and hearing in _Finnegans Wake_, see John Bishop, _Joyce's book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake_ (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1986), Chapter 9 "Earwickerwork," 264-304. ^27^ Jorge Luis Borges, _Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952_, trans. Ruth R. Sims (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 6-9. ^28^ Lorraine Weir (1989). ^29^ Elizabeth Eisenstein, _The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe_ (NY: Cambridge UP, 1983). ^30^ Bishop (1986), 264-304. ^31^ Eugene Jolas, "My Friend James Joyce," in _James Joyce: two decades of criticism_, ed. Seon Givens (NY: Vanguard, 1948), 24. ^32^ E.g., in Frances Yates, _The Art of Memory_ (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966). ^33^ James Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, _Letters_, ed. Stuart Gilbert (NY: Viking, 1957), 251 [Postcard, 16 April 1927]. ^34^ For a discussion of this see Gilles Deleuze, _Bergsonism_ (NY: Zone, 1988), Chapter 3, "Memory as Virtual Co-existence," 51-72. ^35^ Speaking of the all-embracing aspects of VR and cyberspace, the work which Baudrillard has made of "simulation" and "the ecstasy of communication" should be noted. This issue is too complex to engage within an essay specifically focused on Joyce. In approaching it, however, it is important to realize the degree of similarity that Baudrillard's treatment of communication shares with McLuhan's. In many ways, I believe it could be established that what Baudrillard critiques as the "ecstasy of communication" is his understanding of McLuhan's vision of communication divorced from its historical roots in the literature and arts of symbolisme, high modernism, and particularly James Joyce. ^36^ This is a major theme of McLuhan and McLuhan's _The Laws of Media_ (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1988). ^37^ See Donald F. Theall, _The Medium is the Rear View Mirror; Understanding McLuhan_ (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1971). ^38^ John O'Neill credits Vico with a "wild sociology" in which the philologist is a wild sociologist in _Making Sense Together: An Introduction to Wild Sociology_ (NY: Harper & Row, 1974), 28-38. The significance of Vico's emphasis on the body is developed in John O'Neill, _Five Bodies: The Human Sense of Society_ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985). The Movers by E. Russell Smith Daphne awakens at grey dawn, and lies fretting through the early hours. The house around her clutches at its wholeness even as its inner structure falls apart, sighs as its viscera shrivel into boxes and barrels. Its furniture convokes in emergency caucus; its carpets roll against the bare baseboards. After eleven years of searching for a poised style, an effective artifice for coping, Daphne feels that she has failed. But when the men arrive the sun is high; it filters through the tracery of elms and litters the tiny lawn with fragments of light. It wavers through imperfect window panes and rides dust motes onto her rumpled sheets. The trees have grown and now there is too much shade, but nothing else has changed. The Globe and Mail thumps against the door. New cars gleam in the driveways, and someone else's children play hopscotch on the footpath by the Rideau Canal. She is sitting at her vanity, letting down her braids when the door bell rings. Brushing her long auburn hair is a daily act of devotion, not to be interrupted. "Theo," she calls, "will you let them in?" He is in the utility room, reading the meters. She locks herself in her dressing room, and picks up her brush again. They have been packing for days, together, a degree of communion that has been rare in recent years. All the delicate treasures of their travels are wrapped in tissue, nested in tea cases. Porcelain from France, and Belgian silver. Transparent souvenirs of Venice. Haida drums still redolent of animals that died to make them. A soapstone carving of an Inuit madonna. They cannot take the conservatory that they added to the breakfast room, nor the Delft tiles on the fireplace. Theo's silver maple has to stay. Daphne smiles. He fell out of it once, and broke his arm, while hanging a feeder for the hummingbirds. The drapes in the dining room remain behind, and the panelling in Theo's study -- a room which Daphne had once furnished as a nursery. They can take their bed, and their nights of compromise and reconciliation. And a framed water-colour of Queen's University, painted by a lost friend of twenty years ago. Dougal, an artist with a studio on Wolfe Island, was still a bachelor at thirty-five. "Why not?" said Theo, when Daphne proposed that she go with Dougal to the opening of the Morrice exhibition in Montreal. "We thought we might take in the ballet as well," she said. "The National is at the Place des Arts. Why don't you come too? We'll get a B&B on Crescent Street." "No, no, you two go ahead. Your gay friend won't be a problem, will he?" Theo maintained a handy mental file of stereotypes and firm consistencies. Bachelor artists who liked ballet were ipso facto homosexual. So Daphne and Dougal went to Montreal, and stayed two nights. Theo was left free to spend long uninterrupted hours at the laboratory, building computer models of "recombinant chromosomes for prokaryotic cloning." (Daphne didn't know what he was talking about either.) Theo was surprised by Daphne's pregnancy, but he was also very absent-minded about their sex life. He was only sure that he did not want to be a father. A child would destroy their domestic equilibrium. Daphne agreed that it was too soon to start a family -- they were both under thirty -- and she sought an abortion. Intellectually she created between herself and the life in her womb a distance which sustained her as far as the door of the clinic, but in the end the emotional trauma was sharper and more persistent than the physical pain. Theo was appropriately solicitous. But Dougal was devastated. He went away to live in the Yukon, and Daphne never saw him again. Theo published papers based on his doctoral thesis and attracted many offers. He took a post in Ottawa at the National Research Council. Daphne's classmate Glenda had preceded her to the capital and a job at the Archives. She introduced Daphne to the director, and soon thereafter Daphne was working in Restoration and Binding, with special responsibility to the curator of manuscripts. She and Theo bought a post-modern town house by the canal. Theo opens the door to the movers. Daphne braids her hair and comes down to find the men still discussing the order of the day's events. Theo has prepared a speech in bad French, but he is answered firmly in superior English, and he gladly surrenders. This is the first of the day's cultural surprises. Elzear and Armand are large men, black and white respectively. Either one could break her in his great fist. Which of them is the more threatening, padding silently about in soft-soled shoes? Daphne trembles when Elzear, the Haitian, appears carrying the television console on his back, as easily as if it were a carton of styrofoam. He is probably the older of the two, completely bald, with dark deep-set eyes. His blackness gleams beneath his plain white T-shirt. Armand, who seems to be in charge, wears the motto 'Meanest Flower' across his massive chest. Daphne is startled at his reaction when he discovers her looking at it. "'To me'," he declaims, "'the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'" Daphne gathers territorial courage, for this gentle giant is treading on her ground. "Wordsworth!" she announces, triumphantly. "Armand, how did you make the acquaintance of Wordsworth?... Oh, pleasebe careful with the cases. They are filled with the only intimations of my immortality." Her friend Glenda took a leave from the Archives to have her first child when she was thirty-two. She and Morty were soon expecting another. Daphne and Theo visited them at home only once. The house smelled of spilt milk and unwashed diapers; it was a chaos of laundry, stuffed animals and sticky surfaces. The air of happy complacency was too much for Theo. "I had to accomplish something of my own," Glenda said to Daphne. Theo and Morty had gone out into the garden where the disorder was at least natural. "I was bogged down in the affairs of other people, mostly dead. Think about it." A year later the government changed, and Daphne lost her job. "I'm going off the pill," she announced. "Right," said Theo. "I'll have a vasectomy." They might have been discussing who would wash and who would wipe. They lunch at noon on the patch of grass, and watch the birds. A hummingbird dances for his mate, swinging deep parabolas through the neighbour's yard. Song sparrows feed their chicks in the juniper and take no time to sing. Grackles drive the finches from the feeder and then scatter as much seed as they eat, for the squirrels to gather. Daphne and Theo eat brown rolls stuffed with Spanish onion and mustard. Elzear and Armand unwrap pate and wheat thins, cottage cheese and tinned Virginia ham. They accept Granny Smiths from Daphne, and tea. Her second best set is used for picnics. "Let me pour," says Armand, so genteelly that she can't refuse. She marvels at his delicacy. She should have let them pack the china. "Is it Earl Grey?" he asks. Elzear examines a saucer. "No," he says. "It's Royal Doulton. Early '50's." "Le the, mon vieux !" Armand covers his own face in shame for his colleague's ignorance. "Je l'excuse, madame. Is it Earl Grey tea ?" Daphne sighs. "Only an orange pekoe, I'm afraid." The huge load does not leave the empty house till after two. Armand drives. The new house is in fact an older one in Rockcliffe Village, worth half a military helicopter, Theo says. Last in the van, and first to be unloaded are the round stone planters from the patio, containing geraniums, begonias, lobelias and coleus. "Set them around the front door," Daphne says. The lock resists the key, and the new paint holds the door to its frame. When the house has finally yielded, Daphne possesses it entirely, immediately, passing through to the back. The rooms are bare and perfect. For a moment she regrets the necessity of bringing anything into them. The benches lining the window bays are already upholstered in blue striped corduroy that she has chosen. She sits on one of them and gazes. On the terrace a mason is mixing mortar to repair the falling wall. Theo has sent for him, no doubt. Last week the gardener mowed the huge unkempt lawn, and now a yellow galaxy of dandelions -- the meanest flowers that blow -- flourishes beneath the birches. He will have to mow it again, right away, Daphne decides. She starts sorting some mail, surprised that their presence has been recognized so promptly -- mostly flyers and bills, nothing personal. A light breeze moves a branch against a shutter and enters the open house. It swings a squeaky cupboard door. Somewhere a floor board creaks for no apparent reason. The house has its own habits; it has already begun to ignore her. The ghosts of the other house drove her out. "Morning has come!" said the blade slicing the ice on the canal, here clear, there shattered like frozen lightning laid on the black water. Daphne stood in the oriel of the master bedroom. Where the white banks slid motionless over the old walls, she heard the laughter of their unborn children. An old sorrow glided across her cold life -- a dark figure in the brightness, silent but for the cut of steel, a little mourning to be scraped together and cast aside. They used to walk to and from work, she and Theo, along the canal. February was the worst month, on a broken pavement, wet, and the red flag waving over the rotting ice, a north wind off the river. It was winter still and they huddled together as though the end would never come. February thaw -- a persistent misery rolled into one smooth ball together with the remnants of a calculated Christmas, to be tossed at a passing bureaucrat. They would have been content in softer snow. They walked with fear; only a white mist told where the way was, where the water was. The coercive towers of the city rose and swallowed them, tucked them into offices, told them to be good. Keep quiet, they said, about the darkness rising on the shores, now slipping up the river and the canal, while the carnival was raging. Only the children laughed. And about the time they slid beneath the night, the pale sun rose again, and the skater returned. "We have to move," said Daphne. Theo shrugged. Much later Elzear appears in the living room, where Daphne has dropped exhausted on a roll of carpet. "Good-bye, Madame," he says. "You have a beautiful home." "Thank you, Elzear." She gets up wearily and follows him to the open door. The night is clear. A full moon silvers the house and the drive across the front. "Oh, no!" she cries, when she sees what they have done. Where is Theo? Four of the heavy planters form an untidy rank on one side of the door, and the two containing geraniums stand on the other. "It's all lop-sided," she says. "You don't want them evenly spaced," says Armand. "Why not? This house is balanced. Rectangular front, central door, windows equally spaced -- very tight, very Georgian." Armand frowns. "This isn't 1800, or even 1950. It's the turn of the millennium. They must be irregular, for the tension, for the movement. Every pot is unique. Each one makes its statement to the world. A home rises out of natural disorder. How else can there be a place in it for each of us?" Elzear circles about to take in the effect. Armand moves one pot a few centimeters, the last touch of his brush. Daphne sits down on the step and weeps. ________________________ Contributors to this issue: Colin Morton The first poem, "At a nameless bend in the river," has just been published in _The Malahat Review_. His interview with poet John Barton, "Masks that Reveal," in a recent Poetry Canada was accepted on sight. He has published 4 books: In Transit (1981), Printed Matter (1982), This Won't Last Forever (1985), The Merzbook (1987), How to Be Born Again (1992). Various other works include; performance poetry in an audio-cassette, First Draft: Wordmusic (1986); a film, Primiti Too Taa (1987); an art book, The Scream (1984); a book of scores, North/South (1987); a chapbook, Two Decades (1987); and a piece for theatre, The Cabbage of Paradise (1988). -------------------------- G. L. Eikenberry He is a 43 year old feelance writer/freelance micro- computer/communications consultant, martial arts instructor living and working in the National Capital Region. His poetry and fiction has appeared (over a span of roughly twenty years) in a wide range of literary and small press publications including _Matrix_, _Antigonish Review_, _Quarry_, _Pottersfield Portfolio_, etc. --------- Donald F. Theall A professor at Trent University. --------- E. Russell Smith His story, The Movers, took third prize in the 1993 Nepean PL short story competition. ---------