systole-distole

One begins to "get" Finnegans Wake (1939) by imagining Joyce in his Paris apartment in the twenties listening to Dublin radio (and all the other European national broadcasts) on shortwave radio. He starts to contemplate the effect of this new medium on books and the writers thereof. He decides to make a "verbivocovisual" (middle of p.341) painting of this experience on any page of his new work called tentatively 'Work in Progress". He collages many written and verbal languages on each page. So one doesn't read FW linearly (left to right) as one would the ordinary book. As one gets used to this perception, then one can see meanings embedded for linear reading such as the sentence "Television kills telephony in brothers' broil" (middle of p.52). Then one realizes that the pun (visual and acoustic) is Joyce's brilliant technical means for organizing the warp and weave of the global village under radio conditions. It all reminds Joyce of "dreaming" and stages of wakefulness. He then is able to mime the coming extension of the central nervous system (on-off synaptic pulses, dream life, collective memory functions, and the systole-distole pumping of the heart) into the virtual/digital society and the subsequent convergence of "media" (just like a pun). McLuhan was the first to understand Joyce's vision.