James Joyce considered abandoning “Work in Progress” after the death of John Stanislaus Joyce, in December 1931. Grieving, he told Eugene Jolas that “I hear my father talking to me. I wonder where he is” (JJ 644). At times, Joyce confessed, the voice would seem to emanate from within his own body or throat, “especially when I sigh” (LIII 250). This was an insistent reminder of absence, coupled with the notion that attributes of John Stanislaus had remained within his son. In “Circe,” Stephen’s mother appears as a separate vision, “uttering a silent word” (U 15 4161) which Stephen cannot yet apprehend; his hallucination is at the borderline of fantasy but no one else can hear or see it. Adam Piette points to Stephen’s bitter description of Hamlet’s father, “the ghost from limbo patrum, returning from the world that has forgotten him,” while Leopold Bloom performs a similar function, bridging a divide regardless of, and perhaps owing to, his alien status. Flitting from place to place, he is a transmutable figure, “like a ghost,” as Piette argues, “invisible to most […] people [and] absent in their eyes” (Piette 1992: 187–8). Stephen requires the ministry of Bloom in order that his mother may speak in “Circe” as a character in their auradrama, praying for him in her “other world,” yet eerily present in Stephen’s features; her face “green with gravemould” (U 15 4159) echoed by his fearful expression, “drawn and grey and old” (U 15 4222).
The collapse of disparate states into a coexistent plain is a central theme in Joyce’s work, as shown by his early attraction to George Moore’s lyric “O Ye Dead,” where “shadows cold and wan” desire life once again. This is developed in “The Dead” where Michael Bodkin lingers wayward and flickering in Gretta’s memory, ushered in by the “distant music” of an unidentified piano player (D 211). Richard Ellmann observes that Joyce’s corpses rarely stay buried; they cause agitation by striving to maintain their existence (JJ 362). This is a process naturally accepted by Bloom, who not only muses over “[u]nderground communication,” but knows that “warm fullblooded life” (U 4 1005) can be haunted by traces of the lost and forgotten. In “Hades,’’ he considers the gramophone as a viable means of retrieval, which diminishes “poor old grandfather” to a “Kraahraark!” (U 4 965) but never fully experiences the intermediary state between two worlds until the second half of Ulysses, which, as John Gordon notes, “depends on effects deriving from … telepathy, psychically-engineered correspondence, telekinesis, ghost-visitations, the apparition of etheric doubles and (of course) metempsyschosis” (Gordon 2003: 254). Gordon contends that Joyce actively pursued the possibility of “new instruments [which brought] the formerly occult into the realm of the experimentally observable,” as exemplified by Bloom, whose inner components work in tandem with outer forces to create a hallucinatory, and codetermined, space of activity. Taking this to be a generative area of enquiry, it is fair to say that, in Joyce’s final work, the subject’s ability to stretch the boundaries of science, and pseudoscience, would be continued; that Bloom’s sensitivity would evolve into an improved everyman figure, who uses channels of “phone, phunkel, or wire” (FW 502 32) in order to traverse the unknown. This essay will focus on conductors and conduits, namely the medium of radio and its capacities. It will suggest that radio, in itself, may be a portal through which to access the Wake, and a development of Joyce’s concern with communication breakdown.
This term has, of late, been redefined as “transmissional space,” an unquantifiable area that exists in the utter abstract, a representation given breadth and depth by a signal which bears some kind of sonic content, and is apprehended by a receiver. “Transmission” implies a proliferation of objects, free-flowing in an arena that is not acoustic. Sound is present at both ends of the exchange, but in between there is silence. Radiospace is an idea, something unstructured, generally considered to be a cacophony of every noise, and word, in existence. To complicate matters further, these bodies may be also resituated in terrestrial relations without compromising their singularity. In their groundbreaking book Wireless Imagination, Douglas Kahn and Geoffrey Whitehead describe transmission as the place where an object can exist in several forms. Devices of “inscription” and stasis (such as the gramophone, or phonograph) are combined with the “vibrancy” of a larger system – that is, the sonic characteristics of the universe, “everything from essence to cosmos, always ringing with voice and music” (Kahn and Whitehead 1992: 15). Fundamentally, “[f]igures of vibration [live] in the space of an imaginary world, whereas figures of inscription [destroy] the space of the world” (Kahn and Whitehead 1992: 20). Figures of transmission contain both traits.
The very fact of “wirelessness” denotes what Jeffrey Sconce describes as the “sublime paradox of distance” (Sconce 2000: 66), thus inspiring all the responses to early radio technology, “as queer as any transaction with a ghost in Shakespeare” (Kenner 1987: 36). Its global effect is juxtaposed by the location of the technology – that is, the where-abouts of the receiver itself, whether it be a fully functioning radio station, or a cat’s whisker antenna. Kahn and Whitehead trace “initial ideas of unmediated communication,” such as F. T. Marinetti’s 1933 manifesto La Radia which looked forward to “the reception, amplification and transfiguration of vibrations” emitted by “living beings […] or dead spirits,” the “dramas of wordless noise states […] the delimitation and geometric construction of silence” (Kahn and Whitehead 1992: 267–8). The mere suggestion of a boundless arena contracted into a single moment of consciousness was reflected in various artistic and literary endeavors, and “sent hurtling down onto individual means of expression, splintering them into fragments” (Kahn and Whitehead 1992: 22). Marinetti would acknowledge that wireless telegraphy caused the collapse of syntax and analogy, and that those born into electric utopia were vulnerable, as intervention by machines had exerted “a decisive influence on their psyches.” Stephen Kern, in The Culture of Time and Space, observes at length the “broader cultural aspect” of simultaneity; how a growing sense of unity was matched by personal isolation (Kern 1983: 88). John Durham Peters similarly charts the dyadic element of communication, how large-scale message systems generate anxiety. The isolated soul in the crowd, he adds, resonates “through the art and social thought of the twentieth century” (Peters 1999: 15). Synapses are often faulty in modernist discourse; interpersonal connections are incomplete, often silent but ceaseless amid the ether. I have contended that the condition of modernist writing (that which, of course, fuses and amplifies its precursors) was deeply wrought by the ambiguity of radio, its potential and promise, its intimacy juxtaposed with a long-range remoteness. Adelaide Morris’ edited collection Sound States, a vibrant, comprehensive investigation of “earplay” in twentieth-century experimental poetics, also makes a valid connection between the “tunings” of the wireless imagination and the modernist epic. Morris argues for a “newly reorganized sense [ratio] of secondary orality” (Morris 1997: 37) composed of the written and the spoken word, which “engages the newly energized ear of its audience” (Morris 1997: 34), an audience exposed to the dominance of radio, telephone, and loudspeakers, which are all methods of delivering information. Essentially, the “shifting, speeding, slurring, sliding, and slowing” (Morris 1997: 34) of these texts are “all about illogical connections,” many of which are recognized as akin to technological effects: the crashing of a telephone exchange, the spinning of a record, the twiddling of a radio dial.
Wireless words are scattered into an abeyance; they are caught by any one of a multitude attuned to a particular wavelength. As early as 1900 it was realized that wireless had opened a vacuum where the one signal tracked may, or may not, be the one summoned. It was the “main prospector of the ether” (Dunlap 1937: 75), Guglielmo Marconi, who filed for a patent in 1900 which aligned both transmitter and receiver, following several experiments where unregulated “agents” distorted his Morse messages. Thereafter known as 7777, the patent revealed the blind spot of Marconi, as defined by his biographer Hugh Aitken, which was that of favoring the “dream of direct wireless rather [than] a world relay system,” as preferred by his sponsors. Marconi’s 7777 improvement was fueled by a concern that two senders could block each other out. His intent was to fix wavelengths in the radio frequency spectrum, to find the exact place on the dial, from where the “you,” the absent voice, emanated. Despite Marconi’s efforts, cross-fertilization is the nature of radiospace. Sound waves persistently collide with each other, regardless of technological stability or directives. Another factor is the disruptive element of static – the official term being “generic radio interference” – which might construct an incorrect answer or meaning amid its sibilant white noise.
Thematically, any technology can be traced through the Joycean maze; being, as he was, a self-styled afficionado of popular culture. As Donald Theall notes, machines of communication operate on three levels, all of which are amalgamated into a “copresence” (Theall 1997: 139). Firstly, “traditional sign systems (hieroglyphics, alphabets, icons, drawings)”; secondly, “technologically mediated modes of reproduction (books, telephone, film)”; and lastly, “crafted modes of popular expression dependent either on the traditional or the technologically mediated (sermons, pantomimes, riddles, comics)” (Theall 1997: 151). It could be argued that radio encompasses all three, insofar as it affects the power of inscription, and provides a platform for every type of oral expression. Harry Levin’s assertion that Joyce was replacing the archangel’s trumpet with an electric amplifier has been since elaborated upon, along with his conviction that the “loudspeaker” of radio is indeed the “medium of Finnegans Wake” (Levin 1941: 67). Recent critical appreciations such as Techne: James Joyce, Hypertext and Technology, by Louis Armand (2003), have raised the necessity of mapping Joyce’s work alongside communications technologies of the early twentieth century, as they not only affect the structural logic of his work, but, as Armand contends, reveal Joyce’s own awareness of these developments. This is not universally seen as communicative in itself. Michael Begnal has added that, whilst radio may indeed be a “central symbol” in the Wake, the problem arises from lack of “recognition on the part of the reader” as to who is speaking (Begnal and Eckley 1975: 26). In an essay which partially addresses this issue, and thus provides a starting point for the topic in general, James A. Connor charts the ways in which Joyce reset the technologies of his environment into an “older form” (the novel) and, in doing so, reproduced the “audial” in his language experiments. This is asserted more forcibly by Theall, who places Joyce ahead of his contemporaries for his adaptation of “technoscientific phenomena” into “language, gesture, speech and print/writing” (Armand 2004: 29) rather than into the visual arts.
Connor deals with the experience of radio listening in the 1920s and 30s,”the “high-altitude skips [the] superheterodyne screeches” (Morris 1997: 18), and the “squeals and whistles, howls like banshees keening through the airwaves” (Morris 1997: 20), all caused by failure to perform the laborious tuning, and retuning, of the headset or speaker. He also highlights the issue of structure and content of radio, where a bandwidth is “broad enough to permit a multitude of conflicting ideas” (Morris 1997: 24). This correlates to Joyce’s mixing of codes, and, as Eric McLuhan briefly remarks, the presenting of radio as “not only a mighty awakener of archaic memories, forces and animosities, but a decentralizing, pluralistic force” (McLuhan 1997: 307). Correspondingly, Laurent Milesi writes that Joyce’s portmanteau idiom in the Wake is so pliable that it allows all languages to interact and coexist in a “cosmopolitics” (Milesi 2004). Joyce’s ideal desire to let any fragment of the Wake speak to any citizen of the world is that of “the imaginative forces of poetry in bridging the post-babelian linguistic gap, if only in a dream” (Milesi 2004: 161). Global communication is not achieved through a common denominator, but by the cross-fertilization of single entities. When considering Joyce’s trajectory from the particular to the universal, it is possible that the syntheticism of the Wake and its rejection of a single communicative framework is part of the author’s notion of how the work might be accessed or received. Joyce’s comment on the “simultaneous action” (Hoffmeister 1979: 132) of the Wake may comprise a response to the multiform structure of radio, which permitted the state of subversive encoding; yet also embodied the notion of an all-encompassing, instant mode of speech.
This might explain the prominence of radio advertising in the Wake, a sometime narrative which is cut and spliced with other genres. After all, in Book I Chapter 5,
the ear of Fionn Earwicker aforetime was the trademark of a broadcaster with wicker local jargon for an ace’s patent (Hear! Calls! Everywhair!) then as to this radiooscillating epiepistle to which, cotton, silk or samite, kohol, gall or brickdust, we must ceaselessly return (FW 108 21–5).
This is what Joyce himself would have heard in the 1930s, the nightly rabble from various European stations, including, significantly, commercials from the Ireland Broadcasting Corporation, most of which promoted cosmetics and patent medicines. Not only were some of these adverts censored for their tawdriness, but their more acceptable replacements were broadcast subliminally, often embedded within a scheduled radio talk or repeated ad infinitum as the station played on into the night, devoid of programs yet still present on the waveband. On one level, this might have consolidated Joyce’s opinion of censorship; additionally, it displayed a controlled linguistic manipulation which cannot have gone unnoticed, or even uncopied. For instance, when did the message cease to be received “correctly,” and when was it comparable to, or heard less effectively than, silence? Was it more successfully received in code, amid other lines? If language is a distorting medium, never revealing its processes to those who respond and interpret, then radio language (despite broadcasting to a multitude) must somehow surpass this distortion. It transmits a message intended to be the same for all. The Wake deliberately refutes this in Book II Chapter 3, which is retold several times in variants through the wireless. Conversely, the Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies is “wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in celtelleneteutoslavendlatinsoundscript. In four tubloids” (FW 219 16–17). The second sentence infers that radio advertising must still subscribe to a specific type of language, readily identifiable in its lurid sensationalism and condensed meaning. In addition, Latin was once the lingua franca of the Western world; its syntax is conveyed through a system of affixes attached to a word stem. Here, Joyce is implying that, in radiospace, morphemes and even phonemes (the smallest linguistic unit) are randomly discharged and then recombined with intent. A more explicit reference to the public nature of radio is found in Book III Chapter 3, when the people sit over Yawn (Shaun) in judgment and the four old men who conduct the inquest are superseded by “the bright young chaps of the brandnew brainstrust” (FW 529 10). Here, the transformation from ancient and remote to energetic and modern is denoted by the use of a well-known broadcasting motif. The Brains Trust was a BBC discussion forum heard by 29 percent of the population in the 1930s, garnering 4500 letters a week from listeners who wanted their queries addressed by Dr. C. M. Joad and Julian Huxley. Its placing in the Wake is a comment on the idea of gaining attention, chiefly through early radio and its artful strategies. As shown, listeners could be lulled into submission by a popular refrain which secreted alternative information, or actively instructed by an all-knowing authority. Radio will always “let in” opposing frequencies, in a way that threatens the efficacy of the “planned” assault on the individual sensorium. If, as Connor suggests, Joyce deftly rendered this collision in his writing, then it points to a consistent, and practical, engagement with the medium itself.
As noted above, static was a continual presence in early radio. Long-range signals would bounce off the Heaviside layer (a covering of charged particles enveloping the Earth, which radio frequencies cannot penetrate and which subsequently reflect them back), thus swamping the short-wave frequency. The radio apparatus needed constant additions and readjustments to counter the static. “Blocks” were inserted to hold the frequency steady, and filters were applied to keep the hissing noise at a minimum. Magazines such as Radio Craft and Popular Wireless ran advice columns on how to identify mysterious problems such as sulphation of batteries, distortion from overloading the valves on a radio set; also how to upgrade by connecting transformers and amplifying equipment. A recurrent theme was how to achieve “oscillation,” whereby the radio set would vibrate backwards and forwards, accepting one current and simultaneously giving out another. Other tempting offers included crystal-type variable condensers, ebonite strips, basket coils, and the weekly problem page devoted to solving “Trouble by heterodyning?” Such obsessive detailing was to avoid what one irate subscriber called “a cacophonous miscellany of bestial and obscene noises” (Popular Wireless, August 3, 1929: 654). In contrast to Marinetti’s concern that radio might dissolve speech patterns, the overriding impulse was to celebrate the field of wireless technology as a vastly informative and codependent community, rather than isolated souls hunched over their untrustworthy models. One listener opined that “broadcasting has added about five hundred words to the average man’s vocabulary, not including those he uses when the thing won’t work” (Popular Wireless, March 17, 1928: 90). To temporarily deflect the opportunity of labeling the Wake as the epitome of this comment, it is useful to identify some direct allusions to radio technology, where there is “elec-trickery in attendance” (FW 579 6).
Amid the welter of Book III Chapter 3 – perhaps the least coherent chapter of the Wake owing to its extensive activity prior to “Recorso” – the ghost-raising is overlapped by noises. Yawn/Shawn’s first request, as a “temptive lissomer” (FW 477 18) is to ask for Issy’s letter, which he believes to be part of their correspondence, but is in fact, as one of his accusers points out, in “a deutorous point audibly touching this” (FW 478 7) a challenge to his own “landeguage” (FW 479 10). The point is that, on one level, Yawn/Shawn is experiencing a breakdown in communication, and he cannot locate the desired, absent, voice beneath his own ventriloquial distortions. The projected selves of the four inquisitors also mutate into different patterns, like sliding frequencies, or “twinestreams twinestrains” (FW 528 17) as evoked in the Issy interlude. Her melody is ruptured by the Matthew figure, who interprets the sound of the fireplace as an errant radio signal: “Your cracking out of turn, my Moonster firefly, like always. And 2RN, and Longhorns Connacht, stay off my air!” (FW 528 27–9). Interestingly, this sequence focuses on the immediate “harrowd” (FW 527 3) situation and its jarring with Shawn/Yawn’s suppressed memories, but suddenly there is a call to order: “All halt! Sponsor programme and close down. That’s enough, genral, of finicking about Finnegan and fiddling with his faddles” (FW 531 27–9). After a regrouping, or clearing of static debris, the “priority call” (FW 501 15) is detected and decoded by people who have the “phoney habit” (FW 533 30). Shawn’s “superstation” is “amp amp ampli[fied]” (FW 533 33) to the level of BBC airwaves, where “Calm has entered. Big big calm, announcer” (FW 534 4). This is not to say that radio dominates III.3; it is a séance, and its structure is based on reports from the Society of Psychical Research, which often detailed trivial encounters with spirits through the “oujia ouija wicket” (FW 533 18). However, its vocabulary may also reflect radio tropes, as the previous “fireless words” (FW 469 27) of Shaun the Boast in III.2 morph into a more emphatic description of radio tuning:
Is the strays world moving mound or what static babel is this, tell us?
– Whoishe whoishe whoishe whoishe linking in? Whoishe whoishe whoishe?
(FW 499 33–4)
Whilst this is seen to represent a hookup with the spirit world, it may also be read as a momentary break in transmission, particularly with the repeated sound of “Zinzin. Zinzin” (FW 500 5) which imitates white noise. “SILENCE” falls after a truncated sentence, “What is the ti..?” (FW 501 5–6) and the effort is resumed in order to obtain “somewhave from its specific” (FW 501 21). The action is resonant of a dial being manipulated: “Better that or this? […] Follow the baby spot […] Very good now […] Moisten your lips for a lightning strike and begin again. Mind the flickers and dimmers! Better?” (FW 501 13–18).
The coexistence of acoustic technologies and spiritualism has been well documented (Sconce 2000), and invites the notion that Joyce was aware of, and capitalized upon, this parallel. In September 1925, the New York Times reported that a group of psychic researchers had convened in Paris to discuss “Wireless Talks With [the] Spirit World,” chiefly aiming to “Eliminate Mediums.” Joyce was in the vicinity, having returned from Arcachon after a bout of conjunctivitis, but there is little evidence to prove that sections of the Wake are directly responsive to this event. A more reliable source of debate is Joyce’s incorporation of radio stations and their whereabouts. All stations had what was termed a “call-sign” (identification letters to be found on the waveband). Switzerland, for example, was 2HB; Newfoundland was 2VO; the call sign for Radio Eirann, or “Radio Athlone,” as Joyce preferred to call it, was 2RN – to which Matthew strongly objects – chosen in 1926 as a gesture from the British Post Office. (It asked all expatriate listeners to “come back to Eirann,” an obvious pun.) Ireland played a variable role in the development of radio communications, as shown by a piece in Radio News (March 1927) joking about the “primitive methods” of the Wireless Society of Ireland, who had proudly detected signals through the kite-flying method. This was something Marconi had achieved 20 years earlier. In actuality, during the uprisings in 1916, the Republicans had carried a radio set from building to building, in order to duck under the British News blackout, and in 1926 the first Irish commercial station was aired on January 1 from Little Denmark Street in Dublin. By 1933, the transmitter was relocated two miles east of Athlone, operating on 60 kilowatts with a range stretching to middle Europe. It initially relied on relays from the BBC, although the first director, Seamus Clandillon, introduced Irish-language programs. A typical evening agenda began with a stock exchange list, a news bulletin and market reports, and closed with a weather forecast. Owing to financial restrictions, the service functioned in a building without sound insulation; understandably, this caused some improvisatory situations. One broadcaster recalled how a gramophone positioned in the corridor provided the incidental music for programs by “opening and closing the studio door” so that the sound would appear to be modulated (Gorham 1967: 101). For any listener in exile, once “home” was reached after sifting through the airwaves, the result may have been nothing more than confused knocking and snatches of melody. It is likely that the third thunderword of Finnegans Wake replicates this frustration, with its “Glass crash” (a special effect) (FW 44 19). Eric McLuhan writes on the intervolving themes of technology and self-expression in Book I Chapter 2, with all its attendant misfires. He notes that the “[a]rticulate speech is a form of stuttering; consonants interrupt the songs of vowels” (McLuhan 1997: 81) and that HCE is relying upon other forms such as watches and bells, or rather “outerings” of himself, so that he may measure his defense. The allusion to Volapuk, an invented language, in the words “villapleach, vollapluck” appearing in this chapter (FW 34 31–2) might suggest Joyce’s concurrence with McLuhan’s idea that “technological utterance is also an artificial language, and is therefore of grammatical interest” (McLuhan 1997: 82). But the consonant-laden thunderword itself, with its “klikkaklakka” opening, may also imply the earwig with its suppressed hearing, beset with sounds of eggs breaking, applause, alarms ringing, and a rapid stammering which is never consolidated. If this can be associated with Joyce’s radio listening, then it follows that, as a “grammatical” experiment, it ideally portrays the themes of reinvention and digression of Book 1 Chapter 2, “resnored alco alcoho alcoherently” (FW 40 5), rendered through the haze of a dream, a drunken stupor, or a blanket of sound. More generally, it enacts the failure of words dispatched through technological means, and the knowledge that a single utterance heard by any radio listener was a sound reproduced, altered, and mutated along the way.
Thinking, as he did, of Ireland “every day in every way” (LI 395), Joyce would have surely relied upon wireless as a link to his homeland. With failing eyesight, the solitariness of the act would be intensified, being “athlone in the lillabilling of killarnies,” meaning that his native music/lullabies were often “disrecordant” (FW 450 25–6) through the radio. Of Joyce’s listening, I imagine an incessant, restless switching of dials, calling for 2RN, which would invariably be barricaded by stronger frequencies. It is likely that Joyce had a three-valve, possibly five-valve, set with a radio-wave tuner (consisting of two coils and a variable condenser) as it was difficult to reach long-wave radio stations with a simple one-coil set. These developments were adapted into Dunham portable sets, Pye portables, and Lotus portables. If Joyce had no recourse to these more sophisticated models, he would spend considerable time adjusting a 1-valve set which demanded a regression to headphones. These mufflers exclusively fixed the wearer/listener on a sound edging its way down the ear canal, which then penetrated the tympanum. Noises from outer levels would impinge upon the operation, but this was largely an interiorized process, a suspension of other senses. In his discussion of the Wake’s hero as “the quintessential deafmute,” John Bishop lists the “weltering proliferation of ‘hardly heard’ and mutely garbled forms” in the text (Bishop 1986: 269) insofar that the sleeper’s mouth cannot emit a sound; but he nevertheless participates in an “unsounded talking-over,” even “throwing his voice into the wooden space between his ears [and] playing ventriloquist to his own dummy” (Bishop 1986: 270–1). Bishop also succinctly adds that “a reader of the Wake would profit from a few lessons in’How to Understand the Deaf’” (Bishop 1986: 269). Building upon this critique, one might consider the amateur “dummydeaf” (FW 329 27) radio listener, who cannot fully engage with the transmission. He cannot answer back, or even hear correctly, experiencing – in isolation – what may be termed the “Mute art for the Million” (FW 496 7). To obtain a connection on a typical one-valve set, the “reaction coil” must skim the “fixed coil,” whereupon, if a clicking or breathing sound was heard through the headphones, oscillation would take place, and weaker signals could be snatched from the ether. Even then, a “sibspecious connexion” (FW 374 8) would occur – misinterpretation on the part of the listener. This is alluded to in the Wake: the sleeper who hears “his own bauchspeech in backwords” (FW 100 27–8), no doubt composing words out of torn vibrations. He is a “wrongstoryshortener” (FW 17 3–4) who is in sonic turmoil, despite being, as noted, a “radiooscillating epiepistle” (FW 108 24) with “dectroscophonious” (FW 123 12) abilities. As Issy deduces in regard to her secret message, “sure where’s the use of my talking quicker when I know you’ll hear me all astray?” (FW 472 12–13). The spiral of the sleeper’s inner ear creates a “warping process” (FW 407 3) on top of the “uncontrollable nighttalkers” (FW 32 7–8), or “sharestutterers” (FW 28 27) who are already modulated by their passage from anode to cathode, and back again, much like the story of HCE.
During the 1930s, local Paris stations included Radio-Paris (known as “Radiola” or PTT) and Radio Vitus. PTT was the official station owing to the fact that the Eiffel Tower, although equally well known, was the province of the French government, with its broadcasts dispatched by courtesy. Conceivably, Earwicker’s “house of call” (FW 310 22) might represent the Eiffel Tower, with its “radio beamer” mast (FW 380 16–17) and multiplex conductors, as noted by McLuhan, who makes the connection between the “Arab muezzin tower motif in thunderword 1” (McLuhan 1997: 157) and the broadcast tower of radio “muzzinmessed for one watthour” (FW 310 25) which unites its listeners. Another impediment to Radio Athlone was a secret radio station, broadcasting within the Paris suburbs every day, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. No one had the key to the elusive call sign (indeed, a genuine “subspecious connection”), but it was one of the many “noisances” (FW 14 6) alongside the 30 more powerful stations operating on wavelengths between 1000 and 4000 meters. Those closest to 2RN’s wavelength were Rome, Langenburg, and Konigswusterhausen in Germany. There was supposed to be 10 kilocycles between broadcasting stations, but, during the daytime, this was impossible. Radio waves reaching beyond 900 miles were reflected back to earth from the Heaviside layer, this being known as the “skip” distance. After dark the skip distance was increased to over 10,000 meters (verifying Leopold Bloom’s observation that black is a good conductor; U 4 79–80). Joyce would have heard Radio Athlone more clearly still, however, “picking up airs from th’other over th’ether” (FW 452 13) as there was nothing to lessen the intensity of sound, from any location. Notably, the best months of the year to receive long-wave radio transmissions were March and April, given that ionization of the atmosphere by the sun was likely to occur in summer, and this caused a delay in outgoing transmissions. The apparent date of the Wake is March 21 and 22; the wind is from the northeast, there is fog and mixed precipitation. The year is estimated as 1938, for the Wake is consistent with events of the time, such as the Irish Free State, actually invoked over the radio in “Recorso” (FW 604 23), as the final storm report “blow[s] a Gael warning … shearing aside the four wethers and passing over the dainty daily” (FW 604 24, 34–5). However, an article in Popular Wireless (April 11, 1936: 63–4), relates a thunderstorm of lightning and hail which moved across St. George’s Channel in mid-March, “a night of considerable electro-magnetic disturbance in the either [whereupon] atmospherics were so bad that there was no pleasure in long or short-distance listening.” This would have been a freak manifestation for the usually conductive summer months. Amid a day of varying weather, the storm in Finnegans Wake, which begins as a “freakfog” (FW 48 2) and rises to a “hailcannon” onslaught (FW 174 22), may have been augmented by this genuine weather report and its effect on wireless function – most emphatically in Book II Chapter 3, which was drafted in 1936. This chapter is renowned for its “Enterruption[s]” (FW 332 36) and turbulence; it may be attributed to Joyce’s experience of “pecking at thumbnail reveries, pricking up ears to my phono on the ground” (FW 452 12–13), and being harried by intrusive signals. A break in the action is marked by a “Check or slowback. Dvershen” (FW 332 36), probably the station at Prague-Kbely, Czechoslovakia, with its call-sign “OK,” transmitting at 1600 meters and bringing news of German troops marching along the “danzing corridor” (FW 333 8). In itself, this line directly hints at Joyce’s engagement with wireless; a frustrating though necessary pastime. It is also merely another component in the most radiogenic section of the Wake, which will now be analyzed accordingly.
A catalogue of debate exists on the “Tavernry,” or “Norwegian Captain” sequence, where episodes in HCE’s shameful life are recounted by patrons of his hostelry. For example, Campbell and Robinson trace nine interwoven yarns, all of which present the returning avenger who woos and wins the damsel, growing fat and base before angry deposition by his people. Persecuted, ghosted, and finally exiled, he retreats to the purgatorial river (Campbell and Robinson 1946: 100). The principal motif of II.3 is a radio, whose continual presence ensures that all dialogue is loud, rapid, and scattered; every item broadcast from the “earpicker” (FW 312 16) recasts the legend in another form. In essence, the majority of interpretation holds that the wireless is at a distance, exclusive of the sleeper and operating at the level of external noise, as, for example, the “Rolloraped” (FW 330 20), a rollerblind at the window which rips through the layers of unconsciousness and thus alters the subliminal arrangement of word-patterns. This would place the sleeper in sonic turmoil, compelled to filter sounds from his environment into the dream-flow. Derek Attridge ventures that, although Joyce was tolerant of those who used the strategy, “there is little evidence to suggest he associated his laborious project with […] sleep or dreams” (Attridge 1989: 17–18). This would correlate to a comment made by Harriet Shaw Weaver, in 1954, which dismisses the Wake’s supposed dream form as a “convenient device,” never intended to expand into the somnambulistic wanderings of HCE (Atherton 1954: 17). Indisputedly, though, the sleeper is the auditory vigilance of the night, the “earwitness” (FW 5 14), someone “who will somewherise for the whole” (FW 602 7), an “Ear! Ear! Not ay! Eye! Eye” (FW 409 3). Bishop advances this notion brilliantly in his overview of pages 309–10, wherein Joyce compresses every element of wireless, and, in doing so, asserts its central place in the Wake:
[A] high fidelity daildialler, as modern as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute, (hearing that anybody in that ruad duchy of Wollinstown schemed to halve the wrong type of date) equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for distance-getting and connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini-Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker, capable of catching skybuddies, harbour craft emittances, key click- ings, vaticum cleaners, due to women formed mobile or man made static and bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes.
(FW 309 14–310 1)
Here, radio science is described in fastidious detail (even the ohms, the unit of electrical resistance), probably gleaned from specialist weeklies. The “magazine battery” (called the Mimmim Bimbim patent number 1132) galvanizing the “harmonic condenser enginium” (FW 310 1–3) is a reference to cheap mail-order components, which, although very “modern,” invariably needed to be “tuned up by twintriodic singul-valous pipelines (lackslipping along as if their liffing deepunded on it)” (FW 310 5–6). The patent itself is the Peterson coil for lightning protection; an instrument which will not be entirely dependable in II.3. As noted, the “marygoraumd” of radio signals, circling in the ether, must be “filtered” so that “liffing” (the Liffey) and all else Irish, can be detected by the “key-call.” Centuries-old snippets of sound are included in this scanning of “Naul and Santry” (FW 310 13), as indicated by the reference to Piaris Feiritear (FW 310 11), an Irish- -anguage poet (1600–63) still recalled in oral tradition. The consumerist nature of radio advertising is even present in the “vaticum cleaners,” which double as the “vacuum,” or “Etheria Deserta” (FW 309 9) of radiospace. Above all, the most startling feature of this device is the “how-drocephalous enlargement,” which operates the “circumcentric megacycles” or “most leastways brung it about somehow” (FW 310 6–9). This “meatous conch” conducts all and sundry, a mulligatawny of concertos over the “hamshack” (slang for an amateur wireless station). Bishop writes at length on the “otological life” (FW 310 21) of the sleeper; how sound waves “pinni-trate” and revolve deep into the “lubberendth” of his ear (FW 310 9, 21) akin to other “sensing devices” such as radar or telegraphic posts. He proposes that “the real power source feeding this radio is our […] hero himself”whose ears translate cryptic signs “for all within crystal range” (Bishop 1986: 276). Furthering this observation, I would accentuate the “Eustache Straight” (Eustachian tube) (FW 310 12) which connects the larynx to the ear (indeed, the “suckmouth ear” in III.3, FW 394 22). This points to a near-cyborgian portrait of a “man made static” (FW 309 22), as “highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it” (FW 615 17). Within this inventory of detail, there is a reminder of how any radio communication is complex and fallible. The listener enacts a circuitous, one-sided dialogue, regardless of, and alongside, the interactive experience.
It is worth recounting that Marconi, dubbed “the Gulliver of science” (Dunlap 1937: 179), had a “highly strung nervous system” which naturally incorporated a pair of ultra-sharpened ears. In addition to knowing the mechanics of “radiocasting from A to Z and back again,” Dunlap emphasizes that Marconi literally “personifie[d]” wireless with his uncanny ability to dissect a multiplicity of sounds and pinpoint words from afar (Dunlap 1937: 179). For these purposes, not only do we remember that “the ear of Fionn Earwicker aforetime was the trademark of a broadcaster” (FW 108 21–2), but, as remarked upon by Roland McHugh, the sleeper “dialls” into the past (McHugh 1976: 77). He employs the radio for “Hystorical leavesdropping” (FW 564 31) and becomes “the cluekey to a world room beyond the roomwhorld” (FW 100 28). Whilst in accordance with Bishop’s notion that “sounds from the real world are invariably impinging on Earwicker’s ears with erratic constancy throughout the night” (Bishop 1986: 278), I would add that the “free association as a process of radioreception” (Bishop 1986: 278) which constitutes much of II.3 may be extended to include extraterrestrial noise, from an alternative plain of existence. After all, the sleeper is a “coaxing experimenter” (FW 582 3), perhaps even a “dweller in the downandoutermost where voice only of the dead may come” (FW 194 19–20), whose hearing cannot always be selective. The phrase “Listen, listen! I am doing it. Hear more to these voices! Always I am hearing them” (FW 571 24–5) is one which conveys the impression of disorder, a state where the sleeper is invaded by multiple dialogues. As a “Prospector projector” (FW 576 18), he receives, and amplifies, those ghostly whisperings otherwise dispersed (Lewty 2004: 1).
Therefore the reader may wish to reposition the wireless in II.3 as more than simply occupying a place in the tavern downstairs. It provides a linkage to the “Real Absence,” or “Echoland” (FW 13 5)in addition to containing recognizable sonic components. For the sleeper, who frequently wonders “what are the sound waves saying” (FW 256 2 3–4), the radio, “the wickser in his ear” (FW 311 11), is regrettably a “harpsdischord” (FW 12 18). For any early radio listener attempting to listen to their favorite program, interference from nearby transmitters was of great concern insofar as carrier waves collided with the specific broadcast. If the radio dial alighted between stations, the result was a distorted combination of both signals, which restructed any attempt to differentiate between the two. As Shaun’s persecutors point out in III.3, anyone with a wireless set “can pick up bostoons” (Boston) (FW 489 36) alongside short-wave items.
This is registered in II.3 by the conglomeration of sound, how the two primary broadcasts and a weather report, are interrupted and splintered by alternative noise, “crupping into our raw lenguage” (FW 323 5). The sermon emphasizes the Quinquagesima service, celebrated the previous month but aired at the present time; the weather forecast predicts a storm which will soon dismantle the window shutters upstairs. Initially, the sermon observes “the otherdogs churches,” but after a “low frequency amplification” (FW 312 32–3) the speaker becomes a hellfire and damnation “agitator” (FW 333 4) causing confusion. Curses are delivered in tandem with the rising wind, wireless frequencies are assailed, and someone is held accountable for exposing the house to the elements, “for where the deiffel or when the finicking or why the funicking, who caused the scaffolding to be first removed[?]” (FW 313 36–314 2). The storm bursts into the sleeper’s bedroom, in a thunderword of violent excitation:
Upon this dry call of selenium cell (that horn of lunghalloon, Riland’s in peril!) with its doomed crack of the old damn ukonnen power insound in it the lord of the saloom, as if for a flash salamgunnded himself, listed his tummelumpsk pack and hearinat presently returned him, ambilaterally alleyeoneyesed, from their uppletoned layir to his beforetime guests (FW 323 25–30).
O’Connell, the great liberator, and champion of the English language as a means of empowerment for the oppressed Catholic minority, is now an ineffective “doomed crack,” heard through the “horn” of the wireless, whose superior battery power enables it to transcend Ireland’s borders, as far away as Lough Allen/“lunghalloon.” The sleeper must retune his hearing, in order to absorb all sounds (the “salmagundis” perhaps being a pun on the Joycean idea of “word-salad”?) “ambilaterally,” meaning “from both sides,” and consequently decide which waveband to settle upon. The demand to “change all that whole set” (FW 324 14) is a blatant response to this motion, an irritated cry to “Shut down and shet up. Our set, our set’s allohn” (FW 324 15–16). The word “allohn,” recalling the German allein (only), may imply that the sleeper’s patrons are tiring of the interference, and clamor for a definitive “set” or station.
And they poured em behoiled on the fire. Scaald!
Rowdiose wodhalooing.
(FW 324 17–18)
“Wodhalooing” is possibly “Radio Atha-luin,” sizzling above warnings of another “sodden retch of low pleasure” making its way “from the nordth” with “lucal drizzles” (FW 324 32–3, 25). An advert for tea ensues, only costing “one and eleven” (FW 325 5) and the announcement of a string quartet. The storm gathers momentum, and the rollerblind unravels over the window, becoming a “bombardment screen” (FW 349 8) for the Butt and Taff sequence. Evidently these “conjurations” (Gordon 1986: 205), project a sequence of moving images, and thus constitute a break in the sleeper’s auricular experience. Nevertheless, they are “borne by their carnier walve” (FW 349 12), a carrier wave/valve which produces a “verbivocovisual” (FW 341 18) account of the horse race. This is evidence of HCE’s “earsighted view” (FW 143 9–10). He interprets all events “phonoscopically” (FW 449 1), fixing on “stellar attractions” (FW 449 3) which are converted from sound amid the ether.
During the opening sequence of Book I, Chapter 1, we are advised to “lift we our ears, eyes of the darkness” (FW 14 29), and prepare for a multiform acoustic experience, which may inspire a “soundpicture” (FW 570 14), such as this point in II.3, where the wireless interjects with a barrage of visual tabloid gossip. Upper-class women at the race are no longer fashionable, after donning mackintoshes; America’s moneyed “Yales boys” (FW 346 7) are ruining their reputations in New York; the final titbit is, bathetically, an advert for laxatives. Additionally, this passage underscores the profligacy of words, how nonsense and taletelling equates to the untrustworthiness of a wireless connection. Some order is resumed in the tale, with “fullexampling” (FW 356 14), but a reference to the sleeper’s “static” body is once again invoked, as the patrons offer to “sock him up,” [electrify him] like a “ham” [radio ham], “a ham pig” (FW 359 19–21), who listens in: the “eariewhigg” who deserts his post (FW 360 32). Ultimately, in the choppy climate of II.3, all elements are “rent, outraged [and] yewleaved” (FW 339 28), and mere “humble indivisibles in the grand continuum” (FW 479 21–2). As the section closes, the four avunculists, who recur in multiple form throughout the text, struggle to find their longitude and latitude: “Highohigh! Sinkasink! / Waves” (FW 373 7–8). As the chapter subsides, “[t]he auditor learns” (FW 374 6), perhaps that information should not be passed from “story to story” (FW 374 32), in the “wakes of his ears” (FW 382 25), where “flash becomes word and silents selfloud” (FW 267 16–17).
Of course, when reading the Wake through a specific idea, or conviction, the danger is simply to produce a catalogue of evidence. One way to sidestep this tendency is to withdraw from textual detail and view the Wake as a larger project, whose effect may also align to one’s interpretation, but it nevertheless reduces the risk of overemphasis. To this end, when viewing the thunderwords as a collective construct, they seem to mimic the acoustic disturbance of static, whereupon white noise is visually rendered. They are not only fractions of noise, but also occur in linguistic variations of around a thousand letters. As readers, our eye notes cacophony that the ear silently translates into sound, and we can detect a perpetual, distant, noise, far more akin to the music of the spheres than a clunking verbal rendition. When perceiving Book II Chapter 2 in its entirety, the “Study Period – Triv and Quad” is a medley of crossings and intersections, “devoted to the appearance of … words on the page” (Hart 1962: 36), and comparable to Apollinaire’s caligramme “Voyage,” where the etching of a telegraph pole crossed by wires functions as a musical time signature for words printed below (Apollinaire 1980: 92–3). The order of II.2 may also suggest a playful experiment with how, and what, is received through a radio set. Situated in the center of the Wake, it implies a meticulous working method, whereby a list of sounds is compiled before being dismantled and turned back into static; in itself, an academic exercise. Before the chapter begins, an exclamation of “Uplouderamainagain!” (FW 258 19) indicates the manual operating of a radio, where “phonoised by that phenomenon, the unhappitents of the earth have terrumbled from fimament unto fundament and from tweedledeedumms down to twiddledeedees” (FW 258 22–4). Such “dial […] doodling” (FW 306 8) creates an aural impression for the reader, where voices surge from the “unterdrugged” (FW 266 31) lower text. Radio is able to snatch voices by “ancient flash and crash habits” (FW 289 17), yet, the sub-harmonics on the same page imply that “live wire[s]” (FW 289 9) do not deliver consistent information, “they just spirits a body away” into the ether. Earlier, during the “daily dubbing” (FW 219 8) of the Mime, a message is “posted ere penned” (FW 232 17), due to “interfering intermitting interskips from them (pet!) on herzian waves” (FW 232 9–11), the “pip” and “pet” of telegraphic signals from, and to, Issy. As John Gordon notes, she is heralded by double “ii” notations – a reference to the “I” in Morse code – often speaking in a “chimney-borne” (Gordon 1986: 261) language, a “dewfolded song of the naughtin-gales” (FW 359 32), which may allude to the popularity of the nightingale’s melody in early radio, due to the groundbreaking outdoor broadcast in 1924 when it became the first call from the natural world. Issy’s “flispering” (FW 580 20) voice drops into HCE’s room, and echoes in the fireplace where it is often distorted by the semiconscious speaker. The chimney flue is just one of the Wakes conduits, as is the “contact bridge” of “two million two humbered and eighty thausig nine humbered and sixty radiolumin lines” (FW 285 17–19), mentioned in II.2. It has “kaksitoista volts yksitoista volts kymmenen volts, yhdeksan volts,” and many more, implying a multi-lingual channel from, most importantly, the “poet’s office” (FW 265 28); in other words, “where G.P.O is zentrum” (FW 256 29). This was the original site of Radio Eirann; three makeshift studios at the top of the General Post Office itself. Throughout the Wake, in “deafths of darkness” (FW 407 12), sounds are being transmitted and received like the 1902 experiment in transatlantic messaging, instigated by the success of patent 7777. Whether it be during a scene of fracture and disturbance, or a rare moment of concordance, the speakers relay their messages in a certain manner, conversing “across space like dream radios” (Connor 1997: 21), and almost “as softly as the loftly marconimasts from Clifden” which “sough open tireless secrets […] to Nova Scotia’s listing sister-wands” (FW 407 20–2) – a phrase which amounts to an unconcealed tribute to the pioneer of wireless.
Imagine a radio broadcast of the Wake which called attention to the possibilities of the medium itself. It would be as effective, surely, as Orson Welles’ “panic broadcast” of 1938, where radio was used both as an art form and as electric amplifier for the Last Judgment. It is this purist notion of radio that Joyce investigates, as a vehicle for the cross-fertilization of words, mentioned earlier in this essay. Again, consider the various transformations of HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun, and Issy, who oscillate and collide like opposing frequencies, becoming the fragments who speak to the world. The Wake may be our only ingress into radiospace, a void simultaneously vacant and populous, terrifyingly unquantifiable save for a writer who attempted to write the “science of sonorous silence” (FW 230 22–3). In 1941, the artist Edgard Varèse completed his draft for a radiophonic work which would “[split] up and superimpose” every language in the world, effected by fantastic radios” (Kahn and Whitehead 1992: 23) carefully manipulated from select transmitting posts. Given that Joyce recognized the nature of a medium whose listeners are simultaneously passive and active, it is also possible to interpret the Wake as a vast radio project, where the reader’s contractual obligation as a co-creator simulates oral/aural communication and its misfires. Such an idea would be motivated by the limitations of wireless in the 1930s. Its potential as a platform for artistic expression was rarely exploited by radio producers who grappled with how to blend literary adaptation with innovative sound pieces. Ideally, as Edward Sackville-West wrote – in a regrettable oversight – “an Ibsen of the ether” was required, “one who joins things together – words, music, all manner of sounds” (Sackville-West 1945: 8–9). A more recent observation by R. D. Smith, after several decades of broadcasting, contends that
the ring as opposed to the straight ribbon describes many of the best works for radio. The sailor, explorer, or fugitive who comes back to his home port, the pilgrim who finds at the program’s climax that “in my end is my beginning” [are] typical figures in radio, as they are in a great deal of literature” (Smith in Lewis 1978: 222).
As the speakers of the Wake “recoup themselves: now and then, time and time again” (FW 577 20), it is tempting to agree with Clement Semmler’s comment in BBC Quarterly (1949–50), that some “venturesome” program planner, or critic, might “put the seal” on Joyce’s final novel.
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