The Hieroglyphs of Engined Egypsians

THE HIEROGLYPHS OF ENGINED EGYPSIANS: Machines, Media and Modes of Communication in Finnegans Wake, By Donald Theall

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[Excerpt]

Adopting a position consistent with (yet critical of) Vico's theory of historical evolution, Joyce is acutely sensitive to the problems of speech, script and print and their inseparable involvement with the visual, the auditory, the kinesthetic and other modes of expression. He roots all communication in gesture for "In the beginning was the gest he jousstly says, . . . (468.5-6). Here the originary nature of gesture (gest, F. geste = gesture) is linked with the mechanics of humor (i.e., jest) and to telling a tale (gest as a feat and a tale or romance). The grounding of communication in gesture is underlined by the obvious play of the quote which Joyce lifts from Jousse on the opening of the Gospel of St. John: "In the beginning was the Word . . ." Gestures, like signals and flashing lights that provide elementary mechanical systems for communications, are "words of silent power" (345.19). A traffic crossing sign, "Belisha beacon, beckon bright" (267.12), exemplifies such situations "Where flash becomes word and silents selfloud." (Note again the playing on John 1:14 " The Word was made flesh" [267.16- 17]). Since gesture and ultimately communication are generated from the body " . . . for the end is with woman, flesh-without-word" (468.5- 6), an integrated process of communication arises which embraces all signs. The "gest" as "flesh without word" is "a flash" that becomes word and "communicake[s] with the original sinse" (original sin + originary sense + the temporal, "since" [239.1]). The reference in "communicake" to the mechanism of eating as paralleling the mechanism of speaking and of commun-ion as participation in and consumption of the Word, attributable to Jousse's title, La Manducation de la Parole ("The Mastication of the Word"), treats the gest as a bit (a bite). Orality and the word as projections of gesture arise from the body as a communicating-machine.