Finnegan's Wake

[Cal McInvale]

>boy, when you think you're "right," you think you're right.
>
>So naturally, I'm absolutely certain that this will be wrong.  But if you
>want to hear it, I'll tell.

Now, Bonnie: there's no such things as "right" and "wrong," y'know?

>To follow your example:
>
>        Now everybody--//A screaming comes across the sky.
>
>[//, marks the "end" of the text on pg.760.  The rest, we know.]
>
>So here is a call to join in song.  We might traditionally hear a chorus,
>but instead we get a dash--signalling a pause, a SILENCE.

Just before this we get song lyrics, preceded by "Follow the bouncing
ball:" (which, as it bounces across the words on the movies screen, it
makes parabolas, little invisible rainbows).  So where we have the dash,
everyone should start singing. This seems to me to be a "fade out:" the
pictures shifts to black just before the voices begin to rise in song. But
in your view there is *silence*:

>Silence,
>and then -- "A sceaming comes a cross the sky", the sound that follows
>the silence we've experienced before (on 760,) and . . . "It has happened
>before, . . ."  "It is too late."  The mandala structure that is
>emblematic of the War continues to function even in attempts to represent
>the War in fiction.

So a certain form of circularity is in effect.  Perhaps not exactly like
Joyce's in FW, but certainly along the same lines, i.e. "He who forgets the
past is condemned to repeat it" (Santayana).  While Joyce was working from
Vico's view that certain "themes," not actual events, are repeated
throughout history, TP seems to be working from a more contemporary view of
the inevitable re-learning of lessons forgotten or lost.  In FW the cycle
of history is similar to a force of nature -- it just keeps going and going
(like the Energizer Bunny!); in GR, the cycle of history comes about
because of humankind's inability or refusal to learn from past mistakes.

>Yes, I know we're speaking of "different" bombs.  So if you care to
>disseminate this argument on those grounds, it's okay by me.  But I think
>one could make an argument regarding the ultimate measure of the
>distinctions and find that it's equally horrific, a matter of scale,
>which, as I see it, is relevent to the structure of the text throughout
>(sorry to "dredge up" that fractal-chaos thing.)

Okay, now I think I understand what you're getting at.  (And no need to
apologize about the fractal-chaos thing:  I saved almost all of those
messages, since they provide a great deal of food for thought on GR.)


Cal McInvale        e-mail:  godot at rt66.com
WWW: http://www.rt66.com/godot/welcome.html
--------------
What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not
the still photographs of finished character but the movie, the soul in
flux.  -- Thomas Pynchon