FINNEGANS WIKI by Mark Pesce

FINNEGANS WIKI

(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios
of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since
We and Thou had it out already) its world? --James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pg. 18.

Mark Pesce recently released 'the book' version 1.0, of 'share this book': an on-going project (share this course) that a group of web entities and "I" participated in over the last 6 months.

I have taken the liberty here of reproducing and sharing a small part of his text, reproduced from a presentation he made at University Sydney titled 'whatever happened to the book' and a part of particular interest to me, as a budding 'Joycephile' and student of 'maybelogic: the many lives and ideas of Robert Anton Wilson.

I applied a sprinkling of 'hyperlinks' to those already added by Mark, mosbunal link to 'wikipedia' others connect to external sources and 'Joycean' articles, web pages, and some other works by Mark Pesce, thanks, steve: (http://ataleofatribe.blogspot.com/)

Part Three: Finnegans Wiki.

So what of Aristotle? What does this mean for the narrative?

It is easy to conceive of a world where non-fiction texts simply

dissolve into the universal sea of texts. But what about

stories? From time out of mind we have listened to stories

told by the campfire. The Illiad, The Mahabharata, and

Beowolf held listeners spellbound as the storyteller wove the

tale. For hours at a time we maintained our attention and

focus as the stories that told us who we are and our place in

the world traveled down the generations.

Will we lose all of this? Can narratives stand up against the

centrifugal forces of hypertext? Authors and publishers both

seem assured that whatever happens to non-fiction texts, the

literary text will remain pure and untouched, even as it

becomes a wholly electronic form. The lure of the literary text

is that it takes you on a singular journey, from beginning to

end, within the universe of the author’s mind. There are no

distractions, no interruptions, unless the author has expressly

put them there in order to add tension to the plot. A wellwritten

literary text – and even a poorly-written but wellplotted

‘page-turner’ – has the capacity to hold the reader

tight within the momentum of linearity. Something is a ‘pageturner’

precisely because its forward momentum effectively

blocks the centrifugal force. We occasionally stay up all night

reading a book that we ‘couldn’t put down’, precisely because

of this momentum. It is easy to imagine that every literary

text which doesn’t meet this higher standard of seduction will

simply fail as an electronic book, unable to counter the

overwhelming lure of the medium.

This is something we never encountered with printed books:

until the mid-20th century, the only competition for printed

books was other printed books. Now the entire Web – already

quite alluring and only growing more so – offers itself up in

competition for attention, along with television and films and

podcasts and Facebook and Twitter and everything else that

has so suddenly become a regular feature of our media diet.

How can any text hope to stand against that?

And yet, some do. Children unplugged to read each of the

increasingly-lengthy Harry Potter novels, as teenagers did for

the Twilight series. Adults regularly buy the latest novel by

Dan Brown in numbers that boggle the imagination. None of

this is high literature, but it is literature capable of resisting

all our alluring distractions. This is one path that the book

will follow, one way it will stay true to Aristotle and the

requirements of the narrative arc. We will not lose our

stories, but it may be that, like blockbuster films, they will

become more self-consciously hollow, manipulative, and

broad. That is one direction, a direction literary publishers

will pursue, because that’s where the money lies.

There are two other paths open for literature, nearly

diametrically opposed. The first was taken by JRR Tolkien in

The Lord of the Rings. Although hugely popular, the threebook

series has never been described as a ‘page-turner’, being

too digressive and leisurely, yet, for all that, entirely

captivating. Tolkien imagined a new universe – or rather,

retrieved one from the fragments of Northern European

mythology – and placed his readers squarely within it. And

although readers do finish the book, in a very real sense they

do not leave that universe. The fantasy genre, which Tolkien

single-handedly invented with The Lord of the Rings, sells

tens of millions of books every year, and the universe of

Middle-Earth, the archetypal fantasy world, has become the

playground for millions who want to explore their own

imaginations. Tolkien’s magnum opus lends itself to

hypertext; it is one of the few literary works to come complete

with a set of appendices to deepen the experience of the

universe of the books. Online, the fans of Middle-Earth have

created seemingly endless resources to explore, explain, and

maintain the fantasy. Middle-Earth launches off the page,

driven by its own centrifugal force, its own drive to unpack

itself into a much broader space, both within the reader’s

mind and online, in the collective space of all of the work’s

readers. This is another direction for the book. While every

author will not be a Tolkien, a few authors will work hard to

create a universe so potent and broad that readers will be

tempted to inhabit it. (Some argue that this is the secret of JK

Rowling’s success.)

Finally, there is another path open for the literary text, one

which refuses to ignore the medium that constitutes it, which

embraces all of the ambiguity and multiplicity and liminality

of hypertext. There have been numerous attempts at

‘hypertext fiction’; nearly all of them have been unreadable

failures. But there is one text which stands apart, both

because it anticipated our current predicament, and because

it chose to embrace its contradictions and dilemmas. The

book was written and published before the digital computer

had been invented, yet even features an innovation which is

reminiscent of hypertext. That work is James Joyce’s

Finnegans Wake, and it was Joyce’s deliberate effort to make

each word choice a layered exploration of meaning that gives

the text such power. It should be gibberish, but anyone who

has read Finnegans Wake knows it is precisely the opposite.

The text is overloaded with meaning, so much so that the

mind can’t take it all in. Hypertext has been a help; there are

a few wikis which attempt to make linkages between the text

and its various derived meanings (the maunderings of four

generations of graduate students and Joycephiles), and it may

even be that – in another twenty years or so – the wikis will

begin to encompass much of what Joyce meant. But there is

another possibility. In so fundamentally overloading the text,

implicitly creating a link from every single word to something

else, Joyce wanted to point to where we were headed. In this,

Finnegans Wake could be seen as a type of science fiction, not

a dystopian critique like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,

nor the transhumanist apotheosis of Olaf Stapleton’s

Starmaker (both near-contemporary works) but rather a text

that pointed the way to what all texts would become,

performance by example. As texts become electronic, as they

melt and dissolve and link together densely, meaning

multiplies exponentially. Every sentence, and every word in

every sentence, can send you flying in almost any direction.

The tension within this text (there will be only one text) will

make reading an exciting, exhilarating, dizzying experience –

as it is for those who dedicate themselves to Finnegans Wake.

It has been said that all of human culture could be

reconstituted from Finnegans Wake. As our texts become

one, as they become one hyperconnected mass of human

expression, that new thing will become synonymous with

culture. Everything will be there, all strung together. And

that’s what happened to the book.

--MARK PESCE, FUTURE PRESENT(pdf)