FW and GR (again)

[will.miller.ace at artsfb.org.uk]

Just to harp back on Gravity's Rainbow and Finnegans Wake - while it is true 
that television was used in Berlin in 1936 and FW was not published until 
1939, FW was 17 years in the making. But the point is not that Joyce 
invented TV or thought of it first, far from it. Rather, that like Pynchon, 
he was aware of many contemporary scientific developments and built them 
into his work. Similarly, he refers to the splitting the atom and 
incorporates it into the destruction of the HCE deity: 'abnihilisation of 
the etym' (FW 353.22).

Both Pynchon and Joyce treat the cultural 'waste' of their surroundings as a 
more telling record of history, rather than the artifact canon presented in 
museums etc, and I think I have mentioned that the most valuable cultural 
artifacts in FW come from the 'dump' and on occasion are literary covered in 
shit. Joyce also incorporates an overwhelming amount of local detail (brand 
names, cheap novellas, news stories, local events etc) in both Ulysses and 
FW, and in this respect is alike to Pynchon.

While many many religions, historical events and characters, thousands of 
songs, literary works, operas, philosophies, children's games, nursery 
rhymes, some 66 languages old and new, legends, traditional phrases and 
proverbs, are also packed in there - this does not make Finnegans Wake 
preoccupied with the modernist focus on myth and folklore. It was very 
arguably the first post-modern novel. Certainly, the psychic landscape in 
Joyce's time was different to Pynchon's when GR was written, and somewhat 
like a Marx Brother's movie, FW may no longer seem state of the art - but in 
fact on closer examination it still is. Both authors are very tuned in to 
the culture which was around them.

Hmm - what is the postmodern canon - or is that what people have been 
recently doing on both lists?

(By the way, on the subject of books to lose friends with, Finnegans Wake is 
not such a bad choice, particularly if you don't mind a bit of added 
humiliation... I gave it to someone once and just got laughed at!)