James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics by Donald F. Theall, and: The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake by Eric McLuhan

Abstract

ESC 25, 1999 scription of Branwell’s idiosyncratic presentation bring alive the writing process. The periods, for example, which are liberally scattered over Branwell’s pages, “indicate nothing more than Branwell resting his quill while trying to think what the next word(s) should be” (footnote, xxvii). Surprisingly, the scholarly apparatus of this volume realises more vividly than anything else I have ever read the extraordinary habits of the Bronte children. NOTES 1 Joan Rees, Profligate Son: Branwell Bronte and His Sisters (Lon­ don: Robert Hale, 1968). 2 Juliet Barker, The Brontes (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994). 3 Christine Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Bronte (Ox­ ford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). 4 Robert G. Collins, The Hand of the Arch-Sinner: Two Angrian Chronicles of Branwell Bronte (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). xxxix. 5 Ibid., xvii. 6 Ibid., xxxiv. MAGGIE BERG / Queen’s University Donald F. Theall, James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics (Toronto: Uni­ versity of Toronto Press, 1997). xxii, 246. $50.00 cloth. Eric McLuhan, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (Toron­ to: University of Toronto Press, 1997). xvii, 340. $50.00 cloth. The name of James Joyce has always been associated with avant-garde cultural movements. Donald F. Theall’s fascinating and important book shows just how extensive that association was. By situating Joyce in the pre-history of cyberspace, Theall outlines the complex nature of what he calls the Irish writer’s “techno-poetics,” that is, of the interrelationship between sci­ ence, mathematics, technology, and semiotics in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. 98 R E V IE W S In his opening chapter, Theall delves into Joyce’s treatment o f the art work as “machine” and aligns it with the contem­ porary projects of Duchamps, the Dadaists, and the Futur­ ists. When Joyce spoke of himself as a “poetic engineer,” he meant that he was both a bricoleur (in Levi-Strauss’s sense) who uses whatever fragments of language, myth, and legend are at hand, and a modern pragmatic engineer who system­ atically designs and puts them together. His last two books, therefore, abound in references to diverse aspects of professional engineering, such as mechanics and strategic planning, to the trope of the book as machine, as well as to new modes of social organization and technological production. Joyce’s merger of the figure of bricoleur and engineer allowed him to construct a playful “chaosmos,” a fictional cosmos of ordered disorder that anticipated the discovery of the complementarity or uncertainty principle in physics, as reflected in the polyphonic voices, words, and languages of the Wake that produce “a chaos that still has a kind of intelligibility” (12). Joyce assumed the role of cultural assembler with some am­ bivalence, however. While intrigued by the new technological advances, Joyce nevertheless satirized their underlying spirit: “If he realizes people are machinic ... they are not mechanized” (9). Theall adapts the term “machinic” from the writings of Deleuze and Guattari to designate an assemblage of bodies in a society rather than the production of goods. “Machine” and “machinic” are not intended to be synonymous, even though the two senses sometimes overlap. Leopold Bloom can thus lament the negative aspects of what Nietzsche called “the ma­ chine age” : Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Labour saving apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured mon­ sters for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour. ( Ulysses 391) In passages such as this one, Joyce’s characters seem to part company with the tenets of the Futurists. If mechanization is one of the key motifs of our century’s discourse about what con­ stitutes the “modern,” as Theall rightly claims, then it would 99 ESC 25, 1999 be fitting to set Joyce’s reservations alongside those of con­ temporaries such as E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley, among others, who viewed the impact that the new technologies were having on everyday life a good deal more sceptically than enthusiastically. Theall notes the ambiguity of Joyce’s response but does not probe its full implications. Consequently, some important points still need to be consid­ ered. Given Joyce’s libertarian political vision, for example, how would he have...