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About the event

This talk aims to do three things. First, for those who have had the good sense not to have read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), it will provide a brief primer in the principal characters and events of the novel, as well some of its experiments with language. Second, it will make an argument for considering the Wake as what I will call a ‘technography of the first media age’. ‘Technography’ is a term developed by David Trotter, James Purdon, Sean Pryor, and others to describe, in Purdon’s words, ‘cases of writing which calibrate their formal processes with particular precision to the affordances and resistances of a specific environment of technological mediation’. In this case, the environment is what Trotter calls the ‘First Media Age’, characterised by the increasingly dominant role of media and communications technologies in everyday life in Western countries over the period 1927-1939, a timespan that coincides almost exactly with the writing of the Wake. It is well known that Joyce features and parodies a range of communications technologies in the Wake, from telegraphy and telephony to broadcast radio and television (then still in its infancy). My argument is that the Wake encodes a much broader and deeper engagement with both the history and theory of communications. In a nutshell, the heart of the Wake’s plot concerns the whereabouts and contents of a letter. Written by one of the Wake’s warring twin brothers, Shem the Penman, this letter has been entrusted to his brother, Shaun the Post, to deliver, and it has, of course, gone astray. In other words, the Wake dramatizes one of the cardinal distinctions of communications theory: between the message and the medium, the content and the carrier, the Penman and the Post.

In the third section, the talk will illustrate the Wake’s ‘technography’ by examining Book III, Chapter 3, known as ‘Yawn’, which takes the form of a séance. Shaun the Post has fallen asleep next to his mailbag and in his unconscious state is interrogated by the Wake’s four old men about the events of the book to this point. The sleeping Shaun becomes a kind of spiritual medium through which the voices of the Wake’s principal characters speak in turn. But this séance also features telegrams, phone calls, and radio broadcasts, not to mention excerpts from letters in the mailbag. My argument is that, although Joyce was invariably mocking of the claims of spiritualism, the séance in this chapter explores a grey zone between spiritualist mediums and electronic media, and that what it suggests is that similar structures of fantasy lie behind both modern spiritualism and what John Durham Peters calls the ‘dream of perfect communication’ that powered the emerging global industries and empires of media and telecommunications. 

Bio

Dr Russell Smith lectures in Modernist Literature and Literary Theory at the Australian National University, Canberra. He has published widely on the work of Samuel Beckett, as well as on various topics in modernist and contemporary literature, literary theory, and visual art. His current project, provisionally titled James Joyce’s Radio Tower of Babel, examines Finnegans Wake (1939) through the lens of its treatment of the history and theory of telecommunications systems and technologies, from ancient postal networks to the latest technologies of what the Wake itself calls ‘this wireless age’.